Slashdot Mirror
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."
It will be interesting to see what a user is allowed to run on their own computer in their home when connecting to a site on the internet :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
LEFT the site, he means... the extra traffic was from the publicity in the media, on slashdot, reddit, digg, etc ('wtf is this site? never heard of it before', 'does it really block adblock?' -- no it first discriminates against those with scripting disabled.. scripts are what they use to target adblockers, browse with css and scripting off it sorta works).. and that extra traffic has long since faded... so lets stir up another rats nest and controversy and target mobile users because any publicity is better than no publicity.
even with scripting off and adblock on the fucking bild.de site still dropped 2 megs of crud (57 files, 1855 kb gzipped, 2626 kb uncompressed.. according to webdev toolbar), all to display the 'noscript' dialog and hide everything else.... 300 bytes of a plain html doc would have done the same thing.
for me... if he wants to pay the percentage of shit vs content (aside from actual images in content, its probably over 95% shit and 5% content) on his sites of OUR internet bills (about $204 usd monthly)... sure, i'll send him a bill every month, expect immediate payment, and then turn off adblockers to visit his sites. until then... they simply do not exist. bild.what?
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 ... Over two-thirds of the users concerned switched off their adblocker.
Did they? Or did they simply not come back?
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?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
It didn't work out for the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star here in Canada, so you'd be right it didn't work. Then again, news papers are bleeding print subs and online viewership everywhere. Mainly because the media is either shilling for their buddies w/o disclosing it, or people can find exactly the same news on 3 or 4 other sites, that don't have a paywall of some kind.
Om, nomnomnom...
Precious little, in a while. There's more and more support to the idea that any device to be connected to the internet will have to be"audited" for "potentially harmful" software and "certified" by "authorities". I know it sounds unacceptable right now but give it time and everybody will simply shrug and say "it's for our own safety and besides, what can we do?"
Various adblockers already have the option to load but not display ads. It's a waste of bandwidth, but likely defaults this measure and at least reduces the annoyances/infections.