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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."
Litigate instead!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Congrats. You now have a group of people seeing your ads that wanted to not see them so bad they bought an app. I'm sure this business model will work out for you in the long run.
Speaking of ads, SlashDot, what's with these brain-dead, demographic-curdling "paid posts" you're running? The one I see on your home page now, and I swear I am not shitting thee, reads:
>> Poor, misunderstood cloud computing. As it turns out, most Americans have no idea what it actually is. (Hint: it has nothing to do with the sky.)
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.
Just use APK's Hosts File Engine, I'm sure he's already got their domains in the list.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
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.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Nowadays blocking advertising is required to prevent malware infections.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
The problem is that the well is irreversibly poisoned.
You can pay for access to the site, and you still get bombarded with ads. From the point of view of the those running the site, they already got your money. Then if they get a bit of extra profit from the advertisers, all the better.
Same if you pay to have any data stored in the atmospheric water vapor formations and kept "private". It will still be sold to 3rd parties, except that it will command higher prices.
"Hey, this guy is paying to keep your nose out of his data, so if you want to stick your nose in it, it will cost you extra." And they get your money as well.
This business model pushes everyone to be a freeloader. Since you get the freeloader treatment anyway, why pay for it ?
Ssssssshhhhhhhh don't say his name! You may attract him. And nobody wants to read his crap anymore.
Hold my beer and watch this!
Well, part of it is that even a small payment can still incur a psychologically large cost. If each user post here on /. cost one cent to read, would you want to have them load automatically? Probably not, many of them are not worth that much, and you could quickly run up a bill of a few hundred dollars a year on that sort of thing from this site alone. So instead you'd have to take more time to think about what was worth spending even a little on, because it adds up and the price doesn't really match the value to you of the thing you'd be paying for.
Something similar happens when people have metered or capped Internet usage compared to at least nominally unlimited usage.
You really can't avoid this problem unless the micropayment is so small that it is likely not worth the cost to implement. I suppose if I knew that a year's worth of micro payments for me, for everything I use, was no more than about a dollar a year in total, it wouldn't be so much that it would feel like I was wasting money on the Internet. But because the average user doesn't want to spend a noticeable amount ever, and there really aren't that many users in comparison to sites, the resulting pie of money wouldn't be much to split up. (Especially once you reduce the amount to account for lower average incomes elsewhere in the world)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.