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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.
It's why I don't use ad blocking software or disable ads on Slashdot.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Viruses not so much. Way too much of that going around to make it safe to browse without adblocking - too many ad carriers do not audit the ads that are displayed, leading to all sorts of click bait and virus crap being displayed.
If a site is important enough to me, I'll pay a nominal fee rather than slow loading times with what is often intrusive hogwash.
If it's not, the information I seek is probably available elsewhere.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Bild is the worst example of German yellow press. I seriously doubt that people who are intelligent enough to install an ad blocker would read bild.de anyway.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It seems that the news industry believes we cannot do without them, and that we must pay for the privilege of keeping them in business.
It's quite hysterical. They're in for a big surprise.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As long as I can also block the request to turn off the ad blocker, so it looks as if the site is simply dysfunctional, I'm fine with that. I'm even fine with blocking the whole domain. Bild is the worst "newspaper" one could imagine, it's certainly not a loss for anyone.
I would love to see a company that would:
1.Allow customers to make a single monthly payment, which would be distributed among participating websites according to some metric like pageviews or time-on-site
2.Force participating websites to commit to a no-ads policy in order to participate in the revenue
What will probably happen is that paid subscribers will continue to be served ads, especially from "acceptable" publishers.
Dear publisher: Fuck you. I'm happy with either paying for journalism or viewing YOUR ads. I'm not going to allow your web site to shove somebody else's ads in my face. If you want to sell ads, then sell ads. Including some piece of code from an ad wholesaler isn't going to fly, in the same way I wouldn't accept an unknown package wrapped in brown paper from other random people trying to sell me shit along with my paper newspaper or paper magazine.
Sell your own ads, publishers. That's part of your job. If you can't be bothered to do that, then I can't be bothered to help you get paid.
I don't respond to AC's.
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?
Yes, but part of the problem is loading ads, they can carry malware, they can play sounds, loading times and bandwidth consumption will increase compared to a regular AdBlocker. Plus, the best thing we can do is letting them know that we are not going to accept their ads.
(Btw, just accessed it for testing, out of curiosity, not for reading the yellow news...)
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?"
Their ad blocker banner requires JavaScript. Running NoScript circumvents it.
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
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
The same thing that happens in the real world: you do without the product, and the seller does without the revenue. Quite simple.
Except if I don't trust it, why the hell would I download it? Why would I waste bandwidth on crap I don't want or trust?
The ad sources have already demonstrated themselves to be shady and not trustworthy.
The average web site seems to think 20+ external sites all tracking what you do is OK. Sorry, but I am not here to support the business model of 20 tracking companies who have nothing to do with me.
I won't click on the ads, and I sure as hell will keep blocking the hell out of them. If a website shows me the thing to turn on cookies, or enable javascript, or tells me that I can't see their site with an adblocker ... I'll simply leave.
All those external entities on a website who want my data can fully expect that I will block them as much as I can.
It's absolutely mind-boggling the sheer amount of CRAP in the average web-page, and once you start running the blockers and seeing just how much there is, the idea of turning off those blockers seems idiotic.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ok so your site needs money from Ads to survive, I get it, we all have to make compromises. But you are serving those ads via un-vetted bloated 3rd party scripts which can harbor malware, cost me time and money & track my Ass between sites. Therefore if you put up a page that asks me to accept your 3rd party Scripted Ads, I will send you a copy of my User Terms of Service for you to agree too. In which you will find clauses that require you to accept responsibility for all 1st, 2nd & 3rd party content and resources served by your site and all losses incurred should that adversely affect my systems, privacy etc.
Alternatively, if you wish to serve all Ads in a 1st party context without scripting then I'm powerless to stop you and would be much happier.
So in the end to me its not the Ads themselves that are the problem, but how they are delivered and what hidden factors are present that I consider a detriment to my using your site.
Christ, nearly 6MB in 642 URL requests just to load their home page once. Anyhoo, from two full fetches of their home page. Excepting the dozens of trackers and advert organisations that I haven't noted to be involved in malware, we have:
smartclip.net: Party to LG "Smart TV" spying without consent.
turn.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date. Most recently infecting iPhones.
ads.yahoo.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
serving-sys.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
advertising.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
adnxs.com: Repeated malware advertisments to-date, including Angler Exploit Kit via MSN.com
adscale.de: Malware advertisements.
adsrvr.org: Malware adverts, pushing virus-infected toolbars
rubiconproject.com: Repeated malware bundlers, unwanted toolbars, search result injectors, home-page meddling
mathtag.com: Malware advertisements.
openx.net: Repeated malware advertisments to-date.
bidswitch.net: Malware advertising. Most recently infecting iPhones.
This isn't advert blocking. It's a crucial layer of system security.
Nope. If you want to block my adblocker, fine, I won't go there.
I find NO ad acceptable, but if web ads acted like newspaper ads and sat there, didn't try to distract me from reading, didn't take over my screen, didn't make noise, flash, throb, etc, I'd TOLERATE it.
These days, ad networks are so laden with malware and viruses (when is Google or another ad network going to get sued for not vetting content?) that an ad blocker is antivirus for your web browser!
Corporatism != Free Market
in discussions about Adblock defeat sites: Anti Adblock killer. Works dandy for me.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
And the site seems to work perfectly fine even with blocking the Javascript. Seems those scripts they want people to run are of no real purpose beyond tracking and ads.
People discovered that they don't actually need to access the news site and just go elsewhere.
Look, your joy of over advertising the fuck out of everything is dying. Like climate change, you went too far, you fucked up, you can't scale back now.
We're tired of fake download buttons downloading malware, sites trying to misdirect us or trick us into clicking things for that precious revenue stream. We're tired of being tricked and treated like shit by advertisers.
So now we block them. We don't want to see it, at all, and you can't make it up to us now. Shit has hit the fan, I guess you all should have thought of this before 'someone ruined it for the rest of you'
Should have been more choosey over what advertising agency gets to run ads on your site.
All you're doing is making sure that I NEVER EVER use APK.
NEVER.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I've had malware served as an ad, but that's unusual. The bigger problem is the sheer volume of stuff. One news site that I visit semi-regularly tries to load things from as many as thirty external sites - it varies wildly. I just now opened their page to see today's number: on the home page Ghostery blocks 12, AdBlock Plus another 4. Go to an article, and the numbers rise to 17 and 4. Sorry, that's just too much crap: I am visiting one site, not twenty-two. The site loads many, many times faster without all of that crap.
If they were to give me a choice between seeing their site with ads, or never visiting again, it would be an easy choice: bye-bye. Crappy media sites that regurgitate articles written elsewhere are a dime a dozen. If a site with useful, original content were to take that tack...well, why would they? I subscribe to the sites I value most, and then feel entirely justified in blocking their ads. /. falls somewhere in the middle. I'm supposed to be able to turn off ads, which would be nice, but they turn back on randomly. Anyway, what's with the trackers? The mobile site seems to ignore the ad setting entirely and has been showing the same crappy ads for stupid apps for weeks now. So I leave everything blocked. At the moment, that amounts to seven external sites that I have no desire to see (or be tracked by).
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.