Axel Springer Goes After iOS 9 Ad Blockers In New Legal Battlle (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Germany's Axel Springer, owner of newspapers like Bild and Die Welt, is pursuing legal action against the developers of Blockr, an ad blocker for iOS 9. Techcrunch reports: "In October, Axel Springer forced visitors to Bild to turn off their ad blockers or pay a monthly fee to continue using the site. Earlier this month, the publisher reported the success of this measure, saying that the proportion of readers using ad blockers dropped from 23% to the single digits when faced with the choice to turn off the software or pay. 'The results are beyond our expectations,' said Springer chief exec Mathias Döpfner at the time. 'Over two-thirds of the users concerned switched off their adblocker.' He also noted that the Bild.de website received an additional 3 million visits from users who could now see the ads in the first two weeks of the experiment going live."

Comments

Not so simple

[l2718]

Of course with the developer tools built into browsers these days, it only takes a few clicks to delete the nag layer and get to the underlying content. I wonder how they count me in their statistics?

It used to be easy to read the content off the html – no developer tools needed! Today, many websites are constructed to not serve the underlying content until the you've been served the ad.

By the way, I don't think there's anything wrong with what Springer is doing. Readers can pay cash, or pay by viewing ads. They can also choose not to read.

required reading

[Tom]

What you need to know about BILD:

It's the most popular (by far) newspaper "for the lower classes" in Germany. It is massively influential on public opinion, and thus required reading for politicians and such. Several german chancellors are known to have checked the BILD headlines first thing in the morning to know what the people will wake up to.

It is also rumours to be funded by the CIA, at least during its early, post-war years, and to this day is fanatically pro-american, conservative and anti-communist.

With that in mind, you understand who the readership is and why they are more likely than, say, the /. crowd, to turn off their adblockers.