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German Publisher Axel Springer Bans Adblocking Users From Bild Website (axelspringer.de)
An anonymous reader writes: Major European publishing house Axel Springer has instituted countermeasures against users who employ adblocking software on its Bild news outlet, which represents a daily publication with a print circulation of 2.5 million. The website now presents readers with a request to either turn off the adblocking or pay a €2.99 monthly subscription fee. In a statement the company insists that online journalism must be funded by one of the 'two known revenue pillars' — advertising or sales.
And it's why I do.
Sure, revenue must come from somewhere, but, what happens when your product doesn't worth what you ask for it and you're not willing to compromise your privacy with third parties that do whatever they want with it?.
Would it be possible to create an adblocker that loads all the ads but replaces them with beige squares just before they hit the framebuffer? Or would the latest JavaShit technology still be able to detect these?
Not using an ad-blocker but, I have noticed that the ads have become much more intrusive lately, so I happily disable ads whenever I can. As the disable feature was instituted by /. and a user must contribute (in what the community deems) in a positive manner, I have no qualms about using the feature. I can't imagine the "Good Folks (tm)" at /. biting the hand that feeds them. I strongly suspect that the positive effect of those users posts far outweighs any 'lost' revenue.
Dear Advertisers,
We had a social contract. In exchange for our attention, you agreed to fund our entertainment. But you squandered that agreement and broke our contract. Simply getting our attention wasn't enough for you. In your zeal to make your ads stand out over the others, you started using insecure technologies that exposed your customers to attack. When you realized that your customers were commodities to be bought and sold, you tried to monetize us. You started using tracking cookies. You sold us to your friends and partners. You violated our trust. And now you're asking us to trust you again but you haven't done a single thing to earn that trust back. Quite the contrary, in fact, you continue to abuse us over and over.
Advertisers, you have asked us to return to the old model but have given us no reason to do so. I will continue to block your ads and your malignant tumors until you have proven without a shadow of a doubt that you have mended your ways. Until then, SCREW YOU.
Sincerely,
Your former customers
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I've been seeing more requests than ever recently to "please turn off Adblocker" while browsing.
Funnily enough, I see them too. I don't run an adblocker, though. I do however run noscript. I have no objection to ads in principle. However, I'm not running scripts unless I have a compelling reason to do so. So, if you want to show me ads, serve them up without Javascript.
If you want to hog my CPU and eat my battery... well, tough.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Perhaps what is needed is a new form of adblock, which actually loads the ads, possibly on a low priority basis*, but doesn't display them.
*Thinking along the lines of accept the first 1k of the ad, then go slow on the TCP responses, until the main-page/non-ad-identified bits have finished. I am looking for a system such that the ads are downloading to /dev/null while I am reading the ad-free page.
Of course the negative response to that will be to put some active content in the ad such that the article will not display until the ad "payload" is actively processed and phones home. Thus blurring the line between ads and malware even more than it is already. (at times)
(If someone is already doing this sort of thing, please don't flame me, just inform. Frankly, although I used to maintain block lists, etc., I gave up years ago. Well not completely; I do attempt to avoid certain publishers, but that is on a more manual basis rather than automated.)
McFly777
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"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
They will never be able to vet all the ads.
So do it the sensible way, only show ads you have vetted. When (not if) a complaint comes in related to an advertisement, remove that one from the rotation to re-examine it.
If the web site administrators would show some effort to maintain a quality web site, we wouldn't have to block parts of pages for our own safety.
I have seen pages that actually do this, and their ads tend to show up even with adblockers because they are hosting the ads on their own servers and using a server-side script to decide which one to display/link each time a page loads. As far as adblockers see, it's all static HTML, just that it changes slightly each visit. If a guy trying to get some money from his hobby can do it right, a company with dedicated website administrators (yes, plural) should be able to manage it.
Most ads aren't aimed at getting you to click on them and make a purchase. The goal of an ad is to put a concept in your mind. The purest form of this are the political yard signs. Nobody thinks, "I saw 90 signs for Bob and 110 signs for Mike; therefore I will vote for Mike." But people do respond to pressures like that; it creates biases and impressions that they don't even realize.
Even when you do your research, you are influenced by these. Most of the time, your research is going to be inconclusive. There isn't any "best chair"; at best, it's a matter of personal taste. Most products, from canned peaches to computers, will end up having similar specifications, but you'll have a preference because you like the flavor of this brand or the you had a good experience with that computer in the past.
Advertising helps put those ideas in your head. Just seeing it in the ads will give you a positive feeling toward the brand, if the advertising is well done. A lot of advertising is poorly done, of course, but a well-done ad can influence preferences in very subtle ways. That subtlety means it's aggravatingly hard to tell which ads work and which ads won't, but advertising continues to exist for a reason: it steers consumer preferences during the phase where they don't know what they want and end up trusting their instincts. Which applies to more purchasing decisions than most people realize.
Stupid advertisers want ads that they measure working by clicks, so they optimize the ads to attract clicks, but that doesn't drive purchasing. The best ads are the ones that consumers don't even realize they've seen, but just develop a cumulative effect of exposure. That's hard to do, and requires a lot of time, money, and effort to get right. Even then it's a crapshoot, like trying to write a popular song. But in the end, there's a market for so many chairs and so many peaches and so many computers, and advertising can steer enough purchases towards yours and away from somebody else's equivalent one in a way that merely improving the specifications can't do.
Car analogy time!
So, suppose you're driving your car. Every once in a while, a great big billboard pops up in between you and your passenger, interrupting your conversation. Other times, the radio turns on by itself, blaring out annoying music while someone was trying to give you directions on where to turn.
Meanwhile, each time this happens, it uses up a bit of gas. By the end of the month you realize you've spent twice as much on gas as you thought you should have, given how much you drove. And the car just doesn't go as fast as it used to when you first got it. You're lucky to hit 45 miles per hour on the freeway.
Plus, periodically, something strange will happen with your own or one of your neighbors' cars, where the car will just drive off by itself in the middle of the night, doing who-knows-what. And you have to hope your car is back and somewhat usable in the morning when you need to get to work. And hope that you don't find extra charges on your credit card for stuff you never bought.
But then you find out that all you have to do to stop all that is to stop handing over your car key to every random person in the street who asks for it. The people that you meet are a bit upset that they can't borrow your car's billboard, and gas, and stereo, and other such things, but in the end you find that you can drive in peace and quiet, with good gas mileage, get where you're going pretty quickly, and are less likely to get into an accident. But those people say that you're stealing from them. And somehow manage that without any sense of irony. (The analogy starts getting rather difficult to extend at this point; there's a limit to my car-analogy-fu.)