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Wired To Block Ad-Blocking Users, Offer Subscription (wired.com)
AmiMoJo writes: In a blog post Wired has announced that it will begin to block users who block ads on its site: "On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads. We know that you come to our site primarily to read our content, but it's important to be clear that advertising is how we keep WIRED going," wrote the editors. The post goes on to offer two options for users blocking ads: whitelist wired.com or subscribe for $1/week.
Bye then!
I forgot the third option. Stop reading Wired.
Note to people submitting stories: No more wired.com links please. It joins forbes.com on the /. blacklist.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Guess I'll have to get my tech news from Slashdot instead.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
or not risk my computer being infected and just not goto wired anymore.
Turn off adblock on wired, make sure you use the hosts file as a backup.
Buh bye!
EOF
fuck wired. leave. never come back.
Won't be reading Wired then!
There are many other sites that provide the same news without being plastered with ads every other paragraph.
I wonder if the content on Wired is worth $1 / week to browse sans advertisements. I normally read the headline and quick summary in the email they send; rarely is it interesting enough to actually go to their site.
Since there's no pulp to push, the economics of the price are astounding.
If ads were more intelligent and higher class, they wouldn't be so annoying. Nothing like continuing to see ads for something you bought, or putting up with taboola's brain-dead stupid tricks.
Ads should be as good as the articles they parasitically feed off of.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Pretty funny when I can guarantee I'll block and gain access anyway.
Too bad Wired so full of nonsense it isn't worth visiting for free anyway.
Currently the front page of wired has an auto play video that takes up the top 1/3rd of the screen.
Whitelist wired.com or third parties?
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Do they also intend to give us malware, as Forbes did? :-P
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Maybe $10 per year.
Dude, seriously, you need to grow the hell up and get a job.
I will consider unblocking all ads on their site if the accept all liability for the ads, content, and actions of their site.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Occasionally I come across a link to a Forbes article. When Forbes tried something similar, I just started closing the tab and forgetting about their article. Bet that wasn't what they had in mind, and I bet that isn't what Wired has in mind either.
Ok, I guess right now the ad-blocker detection is based on the idea that they check with Javascript if an element containing the ad is present in the DOM tree. Or not, just guessing.
Any existing solutions for this?
"On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads."
"The post goes on to offer two options for users blocking ads: whitelist wired.com or subscribe for $1/week."
Not the first website and Wired is a horrible site. The articles are centered around the staff who are stuck on themselves. I found most of the articles strongly lacking in real content and there is a strong bias towards certain brands on the website. Do we really need websites that tell people why they should stop burning in their head phones? There appears to be a lot of content generated by this site that is just useless.
It was nice to know ya, and I was really getting sick of the awful font you use for titles anyways! You will be missed... and replaced.
... the last time I actually read a wired.com article. Given the number of autoplay video ads they use, there's no fucking way in hell I'm whitelisting them.
Used to be a interesting magazine, around 20 years ago.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
That's not exactlly offering an alternative.
The besdt reason for Blocking Wired and never going there again, is the mismangement of Malware Ads.
If I can't Block.. No Security is Not an Option
Many websites will go out of business doing stuff like that.. and Did.. How fast they forget 2000.
That is the third option.
What about the articles themselves that are paid for by vendors to advertise their shiny new stuff - would wired remove them for $1/week? Adblock cannot.
Remember Wired? That brought back some good early-2000 memories. So they have a web site now? Who knew?
I remember when Wired was great, it was a printed magazine delivered monthly. went down the tubes over a decade ago though
You forgot to mention the 3rd option.
No more wired.com.
You aren't that important. Similar content can be found at other sources. I don't want to see your ads.
A while back, people asked questions bout why you'd use Incognito Mode in a non-pr0n situation. This is one of those reasons.
Also, i didn't notice anything as to WHY people block ads. Namely, i would have liked a "we promise to actively check ads to make sure they don't try to hijack your browser, or set EverCookies". We're not blocking ads to screw you. We're blocking ads to not have you screw us. Address that and then we'll talk.
If they're going the way of Forbes, I'll just stop reading them too.
127.0.0.1 www.wired.com # fuck wired
I'm done here.
Adapt or die, that is the internet mantra. Adapting does not mean forcing your customers to adapt. It means taking a look at what your customers want and giving it to them. Instead, Wired is choosing to ignore that (I am quite certain most customers don't want to spend over $50 a year to read wired). Wired will now wither away and die, just like Forbes, because they have chosen not to adapt. I will be excited to see who replaces them. Most of the Canadian media attempted this and quickly backpedaled when they saw almost all traffic heading over to CBC (Which must be free by government mandate, much as I hate state media, at least they served some useful purpose for me).
If there's no money to be made, nobody will replace them. That's OK as well, when there's no money to be made, that means there's no value in your service. Nobody is buying buggy whips either! Buh-bye!
I only wish google would provide an easy mechanism to permanently delete all search results from sites like these from whatever it returns me (they don't need to remove the results for everyone, just me and anyone else that is unable to visit their site).
I don't run an ad-blocker, but my company's WebSense configuration is blocking a good 95% of them for me. I'm starting to run into problems where websites are assuming that I'm running a blocker and are refusing to serve content*.
The bigger problem is that what if an ad network is unable to serve an advert? Ad-block detectors generally work by checking if they got a result back from the ad server. If they don't then they assume the client is at fault and either block the content or redirect to another page. Are we soon going to start seeing websites randomly redirecting because there was a network error?
* Granted, I should be working, but I'm entitled to a bit of downtime every now and then, aren't I?
Summation 2
Since when has wired been relevant? It really just means less readers for them. Reminds me of when nytimes put up their paywall.
I really like those ads that start off quiet and then max out my speakers. Please use more of those. Also click-bait with cleavage and a gazillion ads attached to that where they promise 20 hot women and you get recycled photos of Hollywood stars. Oh, don't forget holding you hostage for 20 seconds each time you look at a video, like on youtube. Video of stuff I'll never buy. That's a favorite.
So I guess they will go with dynamic content insertion to protect from ad-blocking (via JS, no?). But at the same time they will need indexing... So shouldn't we just move on and spoof our user-agents as crawl-bots?
"Wired to lose 20% of its readership"
Most people are not going to turn off their ad-blocking software just to read Wired. Regardless, the quality of their content has been dropping steadily over the last decade.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
with the detection? I do not run an ad blocker, but Forbes still thinks I do because I have a slow Internet connection. Since I live in downtown Seattle, ISDN is the fastest option I have.
Gee, imagine how mad we were to get the malware in the first place. Hey WIRED drop motherfucking dead. Right now. Could you get AIDS while doing it? Is there AIDS that causes you to catch fire? Could WIRED get that AIDS? Please?
All ads must be provided by a sub-domain of your primary, no exceptions. Does anyone provide software to do this?
All ads must be static, like JPG. I don't trust GIF or FLASH, or anything other than a static image. No video ads at all (that's what TV is for).
That's it. Serve ads locally and in a static format (ok, I would accept PNG). It's just an image in an article at that point.
I don't want the TV from Idiocracy, but it seems like it was about 500 years early in the making.....
If you want to serve me a crap show from a 3rd party advertisement company you can know you will be blocked.
Wired is tired, we need to be Fibered.......
Oh, and I don't like the current state of adverts on the interwebs......
BlameBillCosby.com
That's too bad. I sometimes like to read Wired articles, but I'm not going to open up my devices to malware just to read yet another so-so article that's been vomited on to their website simply to get me to click on ads. There will be twenty other sources telling the same bullshit story. And even if all of them block me too, that's okay, because whatever the story is, it's probably not that important anyway.
Proverbs 21:19
I will really miss the hundreds of "How Apple's New X Will Change the World!" articles that inevitably follow even the most pedestrian of announcements out of Apple.
Every time Tim Cook takes a shit, Wired will always be there to let us know what a Revolutionary, Game-Changing, and Truly Innovative shit it is.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'd be willing to pay $.01 or 0.2 for an article, but will probably just stop looking at Wired online. Years ago micropayment was touted as a means to support online content, but went by the wayside as ads became more common. I pay $150.00 a month for my internet connection, I block ads for the most part because they are irritating, obtrusive, and they occupy a nontrivial portion of the data transmission. Find a better way to support yourself Wired or risk losing a large portion of your audience. The expectation people are willing to pay $100/yr each for New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and several others for 1 or 2 articles/week, then $50/yr for Wired, Forbes and a few other magazine articles approaches absurdity on top of outrageous charges for slow unreliable bandwidth. I would like to be able to get most of my current news and information online, it's just not going to happen if I have to put up with ridiculously absurd advertising.
Subscribe to RSS feeds using site/program of your choice.
Save articles to Pocket.
Read them later with nothing on the page except the article you want to read.
Not exactly rocket science. If a site doesn't publish an RSS feed or has articles that break sites like Pocket then I just don't bother ever reading their articles again.
I don't get it, I use ad-block and the reason I do so is because I despise ads, this means that when I see an ad, I will NEVER click on it, by principle. So, assuming I accepted to disable ad blocking in their page, they wouldn't get any revenue anyway, right?
If they are charging advertisers by impressions, isn't it more honest on them to only show ads to users which are willing to read them? in this sense, advertisers should be against forcing users to remove ad block.
According to Ublock Origin.
25 or 30% requests were blocked.
Only showing 7 out of 23 domains!
Here's my deal.. Serve all the ads/tracking from at most 3 domains and I'll reconsider whitelisting.. Oh, and default to https which makes browsers behave a bit more securely with what to give to third party domains.
Given that I never paid more than around $20/year for their print subscription, that's a bit steep. I'm all for subscription models for my favorite sites (Wired's one that I go to for entertaining tech news). $5-10 a year, and I'm in.
Heck, for that price, I'll even be OK with static ads that I know are sourced by Wired directly. Wired's demographics are people who like geeky toys. A few car companies could probably fund the whole site. You don't need targeted tracking and all the schemes to make sure everyone who ever showed an ad to the user gets a cut of the sale. Keep it simple!
-Chris
ok so is there any adblock software that actually loads the ads... then silently discards them? i don't mind if it's server-side or client-side (i use junkbuster / fork-of-junkbuster).
I just won't visit wired anyway. I would hardly consider it a worthwhild info source anyhow, unless you're a solid gamer which I am not.
The best solution is to just get the hell out of Seattle. I'm glad I left three years ago. Comcast, despite their givernment-granted monopoly, didn't offer service to my block, and the phone wiring was too old to even allow ISDN to work.
Just keep hitting reload. It usually takes me a dozen tries, but I can eventually get Forbes to load. It sucks sharing an ISDN line with eight other people, but that's the price you pay to work in a cool old building in Seattle.
I installed an ad-blocker because a couple sites that I visit were serving up auto-playing videos with sound, and it was driving me crazy, so I broke down and installed an extension. That totally took care of my problem. However, it had the undesired side-effect of removing ads for sites that I would like to support. It's likely that I could find the extension I installed, go through the options, and add some sites to the whitelist. However, I'm far too lazy to actually do that.
If I went to a website I wanted to support and they displayed a message saying "We've notice you're using an ad-blocker. If you'd like to support us, click here to add us to your whitelist", I'd do that in a heartbeat.
Linked deleted -- and thanks for the warning, Wired.com, it is appreciated.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
after years of abusing ads for profit, sites are now trying to act like innocent victims just trying to keep the lights on.
I see this type of comment fairly frequently, and I understand the sentiment, but what exactly do you propose that they do instead? Just go bankrupt? Can they somehow regain your trust by running non-abusive ads? (Whatever that means. How do you know which ads aren't abusive? Do you check every site or just run your ad blocker everywhere?) What if non-abusive ads aren't enough to break even? Micropayments?
Wired produces good content, so I'd hate for them to go under. I see other comments saying that you'll just get your content elsewhere, but that's just kicking the can down the road instead of solving the problem. The same problems apply to your new news source, which is probably going to ban ad blockers sooner or later too unless a long-term solution is found.
(Moreover, what exactly does "abusing ads for profit" mean? Are you faulting them for trying to make a profit using advertising? Is the complaint not the ads per se, but the ads that track your every move? If so, that's not at all clear from your writing.)
Sites like Wired are mostly dependent on being linked by other news aggregate platforms, not the small percentage daily direct readership. Although I suspect that of that latter group a fair amount of people that actually propagate stories to social media and other sites are for the most part adblock users.
Wired can't expect people to be guilt-tripped and pay for every random link they click in a tweet or blog. Nobody is able to smell the revenue scheme behind a link and nobody should have to. If every link results in a pay or whitelist screen, the site in question will not grow in popularly. It goes against the concept of the hyperlink.
If they do force this, then they are dead... and nothing much of value will be lost anyway.
Have you never looked at a newspaper from the 19th century. Full of ads. And even the greeks inserted paeans and hagiographies into their writings as advertisements for their sponsors. Advertising is how writing is often supported. As long as it's reasonable I'm fine with it.
I don't get where you think this is abuse or that it's something new in the last 20 years. Sponsorship is not new. Likewise the notion of a subscription service to minimize ads or to provide richer content is nothing new either. Listen to public radio if you want to hear a blend that is nicer with less advertising but also contribute. Or are you not one of those people who thinks they should contribute to the things they use?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Since many of these sites rely on their search engine rankings I bet they don't block search spiders that refuse scripting or even serve them ads as that would make their pages way too dynamic to be usefully indexed.
Thus the fourth option after Whitelist, Pay, Go-Away is change your browser's User Agent string to match that of a known search engines indexing spider.
Potentially, no more ads to block, no paywalls and also no malware because that stuff tries hard not to be noticed by the search engines and thus get the site blacklisted.
"On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads"
Wow, that reader must consume a hell of a lot of news! If he (i'm guessing it's a he) is causing 20% of your traffic by himself you definitely deserve some compensation from him, but i'm not sure how $1 more a week is going to significantly impact your finances.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
LOL!!!
Steve Jobs was a superstar/rockstar/important person.
Tim Cook wants to be a superstar/rockstar/important person.
The thing is, without Apple, Tim Cook is a nobody.
Without Apple, Steve Jobs was still an important person.
Why don't any of the adblockers simply request the ads but render them off-screen?
Everyone wins. Content providers get ad revenue, and advertisers get to feel important.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Wired is a site that actually pays their writers. The internet has become a place where everybody wants stuff for free, and expects writers to be unpaid; the internet has been flailing around trying to find a model where writers can actually get paid for their work-- but having trouble finding one.
So, give them a little credit-- if you are neither willing to look at ads nor willing to pay-- basically, you want stuff for free--well, ok, don't go there: you can get plenty of free content elsewhere on the internet. It's a race for the bottom. But they are at least trying to find a way to survive and keep paying their writers.
(Hufflepuff Post is probably about the worst of the lot-- their business model is "we get millions of dollars, people who write for us get nothing.")
http://blogpaws.com/executive-...
http://www.mayhillfowler.com/p...
http://inthesetimes.com/workin...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelli...
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Wired can just go fuck themselves if they think their readers should bend over and take this kind of abuse.
You don't seem to understand the process. An ad aggregator can deal with the Cokes. They would just be paying Wired to cache their ads for them, serving them off Wired's IP address. Wired can just provide them an API to upload and manage the content. The caching can be near real time so it's almost a pass thru.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I had a print subscription to Wired since 1996. About 2 years ago I didn't renew, not because I didn't like the magazine anymore, but because my magazine continually arrived two to three weeks AFTER it was available on store shelves. That wouldn't have been so bad, except that Wired eventually got to the point of releasing all the magazine content online over the course of the month...for FREE... I tried for nearly 2 years to get Wired to figure out the problem, to no avail. Even when I moved to a new house, 30+ miles away, the late deliveries continued (so probably not a local post office issue.)
It's always frustrating when you WANT to give a company your money, but they just have to make it so damn hard (see DRM also...) Anyway, maybe I'll whitelist them, maybe I'll just quit going to Wired.com. I'm sure not giving them any more money.
Are they really getting $1 a week per unique visitor from ad networks?
What can you say? Some old folks just don't.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Wow! From the Wired story: "For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking."
From $0 to $52 per year, in one jump? Maybe Wired needs new management.
"Wait for AdBlock subscriptions to be updated with rules that bypass Wired's ad-blocking blocking."
Exactly. Ad-blockers can pretend to download the ads, but not show the ads. Not detectable by a web site.
I just saw a Wired ad. To me, it was deeply offensive. To sustain a woman's interest, a man should give her things that cost a lot of money?
Option #3 FUCK WIRED!
one source lighter!
You read it first here.
Why not offer print subscribers the ability to not have ads?
It's amazing how badly the web sucks now when you're sharing POTS or ISDN lines. I'm ready to quit my job because twenty people on one ISDN line just sucks. We're in a very cool building overlooking downtown Seattle, but not being able to even get a T1 to the building sucks. CenturyLink has tried to upgrade the wiring to support DSL on the block, but so far they haven't been successful in their fight against the city to be allowed to.
I know of a third option.... Figure out how to FAKE that you are not blocking the ads.
Damn, that's pretty expensive. A print + online subscription for the magazine is only $19.99, AND a free hat (!). Did someone in their marketing department just fail at basic math, or is this some experiment in psychological marketing? The plug-in Disable Anti-Adblock works great on Forbes, I'm betting it will also work on Wired.
That's it, I'm sending back my ::cue::cat !
shit, that joke's old enough to drive...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
For a start people would not be using Ad blockers if we went back to the days of sites hosting their own Ads that are simply static images. Better yet charge by impressions and if clicks needed to be tracked a TOS where the data is not shared. This would bring back all those Ad dollars from Google and the agencies that are the only the ones making money these days. How stupid are publishers to continue to give away all their advertising dollars while screwing their user base on privacy, page load times and intrusive Ads. Google and the agencies stranglehold on Advertising must be broken!
... ad networks take money without verifying content. Ad networks are some of the largest infection vectors. Blocking ads keeps my corporate users safe. I find that using Firefox along with Adblock Plus, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, MalwareBytes RealTime Protection and Privacy Badger helps keep my network cleaner and safer. I've lived through many ransomware and malware attacks and I'd rather not spend my time recovering from such events. So go ahead an block the ad blockers. You'll be less relevant and we'll just move on to the next information source. Don't let the virtual, ad-blocked door hit you in the virtual butt on the way out.
Who are Wired ? I've never heard of 'em.
Magazine subscriptions rarely cost that much. More like $10 to $30 for a monthly, perhaps double that for a weekly.
Personally, I think the world would be a better place if ads were simply illegal - across the board. No TV ads, no web ads, no freeway ads...nothing. Obviously, services that are currently ad-supported need to get paid somehow - so we'd need subscriptions and/or per-visit payments.
People complain that they can't afford those fees - but adverts don't make things free. Adverts increase the price of things you buy (someone has to pay for the advert!), adverts eat your time (==money), they cost more bandwidth to deliver (==money) and there are the middle-men who make the ads and who deliver them who eat more money.
Consider this: 23% of the cost of a car is the cost of advertising it. If just car adverts were banned - and assuming you pay $200/month in car payments - you could be saving $46/month to spend on advert-free TV and per-visit web site fees...and that's just cars. Add in your savings on everything else that's advertised - and you'd probably have a couple of hundred bucks to spend on paying web sites to deliver decent content to you.
So - if I live by what I claim, I should be OK with paying Wired $1/week to get ad-free content...the trouble is that I don't visit their site once a week...maybe once a month or something. $4/month is far *far* too much. Given the large number of sites I visit, there is no way I could afford to pay everyone $1/week.
So I'm behind Wired on this one - *but* it needs to be a micropay-per-visit thing and it needs to be much, much cheaper.
But they have the right idea.
www.sjbaker.org
The real headline: "Wired Loses Majority of Users"
Wired is okay (eh), but if I can't visit their site, my life won't be adversely affected.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
First, I'll make sure I can still visit the site ad-free. There's always a workaround to this kind of malice, after all. It's entirely possible to hit Forbes with an adblocker up, for instance, via a quick google for a nice set of variables to set clientside.
Then, I'll probably just subscribe. I hate ads so very much that I refuse to view them entirely, but 4.5 $/month is not an out of line amount to ask. It's a bit on the high side for a magazine, but not absurd. I can probably afford 52 dollars a year: I can't afford whatever ruinous financial or emotional decisions advertisements will inflict on me.
If, by paying the subscription, I can continue to use the ad blocker, I'll pay for it.
My issues are when I pay for a subscription but still get a crapton of ads.
You can't have both. I will happily do without your service if that is the case.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I've noticed that when companies start doing this sort of thing it's because they're losing money, corporate is not pleased, and they need a convienient bogeyman to blame their decreased revenues on. It will only be once they've implemented their futile anti-Adblock methods and are still losing money six months to a year down the road that they will be forced to address the real, underlying issues (a decline in article quality, a decline in relevance to their readers) that are causing them to fail.
the ads were making my browser unusable. The ads at best were obnoxious. At worse they froze my browser. .
Here somewhere.. I understand people blocking ads.. I use an ad blocker all the time myself because most of the time the ads are so obnoxious and/or distributing malware etc.
On the other hand if you want good content someone has to pay for it.
But paying them to limit most ads and still let them track me is NOT worth it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If I put ads on a page, then I'd have to get around a thousand pairs of eyeballs on it to make a dollar with a lot of the CPM rates out there.
Yet Wired thinks that if you use adblock to protect your computer the amount of pages you read in a week on their site will be comparable. Or they just think that you should be subjected to a subscriber tax...
... whether I'm blocking ads?
Hey Wired,
How many market intelligence firms and cross site stalkers do you need to spy on us in order to run a website? Are stats you can just as easily collect more accurately yourself worth it?
My guess like most sites you probably don't even know what all is going on within your own site because most of the code comes from third parties. Before you tell your viewers to fuck off you might want to figure it out... or don't... just pay out lip service and don't actually change.
However, that 1 dollar a week thing... isn't it exactly what people here and elsewhere asked for?
I don't think many people have asked to pay $50+ a month for a website, or would be willing to pay that much...
What about some combination of payment and sensible ads? Let Wired sell ads that are just images, that link to an advertisers site. Few would object to that, they'd make less but that could be made up by a more reasonable subscription rate (like say $1/month).
Wired could even offer to give advertisers aggregate data for anyone that actually clicked on a ad, so they would not lose as much over traditional advertising... most people would not care, because is the UX abusing aspect of ads (like popover/unders) that really anger people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If they want to sell ads, actually sell the space
Say someone operates a website as a hobby, but then the site outgrows the $10 per month VPS it started on. This means its operator will start to need to sell ad space to pay the hosting bill. Can you recommend a guide for the operator of a relatively small site to learn how to sell ad space?
The thing is, without Apple, Tim Cook is a nobody.
Without Steve Jobs, Apple is nothing.
You know, I despised the man when he was alive, but Apple products were usable under Jobs and that usability has been eroded with every update and release since his departure. Even the staunchest Apple supporters I know are starting to admit this (by way of starting the conversation themselves, not "agreeing" with me to shut me up).
But, how can I say Apple is nothing when they're the 2nd most valuable company in the world? They fell pretty far to get there; think of them as the safe you keep all of your valuables in and never open. Until you actually look, that safe is everything; once you open it, though...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
3. Delete the bookmark to Wired.
Unless advertisements on the web suddenly become 100% security worry free that's the best choice really.
Fine,
1 No auto playing video.
2 No pop-ups, pop-unders, page covering ads, or ads that cover the article where I have to wait for the close x.
3 No malware vectors, all your ads should be vetted (no exceptions)
Break any one and I use an ad-blocker. If that means I don;t read your rag, fine. The fact you are a tech magazine means you are just losing readership and will soon disappear.
The internet was not built to be an advertising medium, yet here we are, the majority of what you see online is advertising. It's gross and sad that we cannot come up with a way of funding things without constantly barraging people with lies.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
.. their suggestion is to whitelist the entire site. This unblocks more than just their ads. It also unblocks analytics, ab-testing, other statistics tracking, and who knows what else. I was surprised to see this suggestion.
That being said, I don't particularly mind opening an incognito window every time, it prevents tracking (to an extent) and they still get to run their ads.
What I would be willing to do is fund a micropayment account, and then pay sites a few cents per page view to replace the revenue they'd get from ads.
Sort of like the Adult Check network back in the late 1990s?
What is the deal with the "I live in Seattle and have slow internet" AC's? I live in Seattle and have 1 Gb fiber.
In other news...
Traffic to Wired down 20%
Ad-blockers can pretend to download the ads, but not show the ads. Not detectable by a web site.
Still detectable by your ISP, which will start billing you for data usage overages.
Basically, by offering a $52/year subscription option, Wired isn't offering an option to ads. Even if they are sincere in their offer, their thinking strikes me as heckish outdated: we are no longer required to buy music by the album, so why would we subscribe to a whole magazine when we just want to read one of their articles?
I know micropayments haven't caught on, but this seems like a good place to give them another try. But first Wired would need to make an honest assessment of how much they make in per-reader/per-ad, and offer us equivalence.
That's fine if a site is sticky, such as a forum. Something Awful succeeds with a paywall because forums are sticky. But say you read ten different articles on ten different websites in one day. Are you willing to pay $1 and key in your payment information for each article?
let me know where I can get free food, free gas and a free mortgage!
Nobody's interested if the free food that has viruses in it. Same for free gas that has water in it, or a rent-free house with a gas leak. Such things are called toxic waste and/or public hazards.
That's... actually kind of reasonable. If I frequented WIRED more I might actually think about signing up.
Noone makes you go to an ad-supported website and read their content.
Then fire that hermit.
More seriously, on Slashdot, does "I couldn't see the article through the obnoxious ads" count as a valid excuse not to read the featured article?
Can I buy one subscription and have it work across multiple sites? Otherwise, if I read one article per week on each of 20 different sites, it's not $1 per week as much as $1 per article.
Cellular and satellite ISPs tend to charge $5 to $15 per GB. If the ads (especially video ads) in the Wired articles you read total 200 MB to 67 MB per week, you come out ahead by subscribing. But another large fraction of readership hits one article and leaves.
Why have ad servers at all? .JPGs that the website then places on the site? Like a billboard.
Why can't a product company have a relationship with a website, and send them ad
Businesses that set themselves up as a middle man or content manager, (such as an ad serving company), just create distance from a company trying to sell its product and the audience- the actual website showing the ad should be the 1 step between the two.
So they only have about five readers in total?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If Wired follows the acceptable ads rules they'll not be blocked on my ad-blocker anyway. This is all an excuse to migrate to subscription based business under the cover.
Maybe pretend to be in print mode too
That's why Ars Technica puts print mode behind a paywall.
one less site to visit.
I have no idea how this MST3K quote has stuck in my head all these years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0kgu3HuvXQ
They'll do what The Wall Street Journal and academic journals also do: serve only the first paragraph to search engines and other non-subscribers without script. It's been standard journalistic practice for decades to keyword-stuff in the lead; they call it an inverted pyramid.
Then don't make the advertising on your site intrusive, and abusive.
Ads have been on the Internet for 15 years now, we're willing to accept some advertising. But if you go overboard, we'll find ways to make it go the fuck away. The rise of ad blockers can be correlated with the rise of in-your-face pop-over infuriating advertising. I know the bills have to be paid, but stop throwing it up in my face covering the content.
You've got nobody to blame but yourself. Think of ad blocker software as the DVR 30 second skip button of the Internet. It exists purely as a reaction to content providers going over the line a few too many times.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
$1 a week? $52 a year?
And they're claiming they're charging that to recover lost ad revenue?
I'm thinking Wired is either lying or can't do math.
on Slashdot? Say it ain't so!!
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If you run any router with dnsmasq:
address=/.wired.com/192.168.0.1
Wired's only demographic is for hipsters who think they're too edgy for Popular Science. It's garbage, I really don't know how magazines like it continue to exist. Why would anybody read it, let alone pay for it? It's the 21st century equivalent of Omni.
...nothing of value was lost.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to Wired, only 20% of the visitors to the site block ads. Hardly a reason for a site to go bankrupt.
Part of the issue is that the number of people that block ads is increasing. Regardless, how do you know that your statement is true? There's not a ton of money in web ads, so maybe losing 20% of their revenue steam is too much. Unless you know Wired's financials, you aren't in a position to make the statement you made.
That said, the rest of your comment is very constructive. Thank you for participating in the dialog.
I'm grateful to Wired for warning me about these creeps.
I'm a little behind on my reading, so I better catch up and see what's new since September 2015 when Wired wrote:
"... Internet advertising is still evolving, but one constant remains: ads specifically targeted to you make more money for publishers, so it is in their interest to fill their sites with those ads. However, those ads are murder on the speed of a page, turning a lightening-quick load time into an eight-second slog. It’s worth noting that ads aren’t the only thing to blame for this. The scripts that track you and peep on your tent-shopping load along with the page, and slow it down too. But wait. There’s more. Article comments often are hosted by third-party services like Disqus and Facebook, and—yep!—they drag things down too. So do fancy fonts. Turns out the web is loaded with weights.
You’re not powerless here. You have many choices for dealing with this. People have long used ad blockers and content blockers ...."
To add to your point, I'm guessing that the print version has less content than the website. (Not all of the online content makes it to the magazine.) So the print version has advertising and less content than the web version while costing half as much. If $25 for the magazine is worthwhile, then $52 for the website is probably worthwhile too.
(This is a self reply instead of making the same comment for several posts.)
I see a lot of suggestions for self-hosting ads, which is certainly worth trying. However, I asked about that in my post: "What if non-abusive ads aren't enough to break even?"
Self-hosting ads adds overhead in courting advertisers and vetting the ads. Self-hosting ads that don't track you also makes the ads less valuable to advertisers, so Wired will likely get less money for each ad.
It is not at all clear to me that self-hosting ads will produce enough revenue. Like I said, it's worth a shot, but I'm not convinced it's the silver bullet than many are suggesting.
National Geographic costs $34/Yr. for gorgeous printed paper delivered to my door every month. It also covers excellent writers, photographers, researchers...
Wired was and continues to be a PoS eZine, worth precisely nothing. They can fantasize about their $52/Yr. for clickbait articles and web delivery while they file their unemployment checks.
Advertisers go for the Superbowl because they have a pretty good idea how many eyeballs their ads will reach, and there's no doubt that the ad was shown at the Superbowl. In contrast, without some sort of script, it would be very hard for advertisers to independently verify the statistics provided by Wired (or any other website).
... implying that Wired's content is worth "$52/year" ... implying that Wired isn't pmuch clickbait
OMG, you are HILARIOUS! Insults instead of conversation, thus proving me right!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Why do/did they think they can just outsource their ads for their online product?
Because directly courting advertisers and vetting every ad adds overhead to a process which already isn't that profitable. Additionally, outsourcing the product makes the process more flexible; ads can be quickly tested and swapped out for better performing adds. I'm sure there are other benefits to outsourcing ads too.
I'm not defending online advertising practices. I'm just saying that there's a good reason that things evolved into the current state of affairs. It's hard to find a solution without really understanding the problem. Understanding the problem means being able to answer the question you posed without simply dismissing Wired and the likes as idiots.
Even if I were considering a subscription, which I am most definitely *not*, I'd say $52 / year is ridiculously overpriced.
It compares in no way to the ad revenue that I'd generate, and I also think it's an exaggeration of the value of their content.
I do pay for Google Drive expanded storage ($6 / year) Reddit Gold ($30 / year), but only because I'm spending most of my web time using these services.
Those 3 or 4 articles a year I'd read on Wired will be covered elsewhere and won't be missed at all.
I paid for a weather channel subscription years ago because it was cheap and they made the CLAIM no ads. That was as it turned out a flat out lie. I unsubscribed the very same day, turns out at the time a lot of people were doing the same. They will just change the definition of what ads are they cant help themselves.The urge to forge loopholes is just too great.
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I'll just read them on huffingtonpost.com, "lightly paraphrased."
You know, speaking of yourself in the third person is a sign of a mental issue, you really should have that looked at.
Also, constantly espousing your victory when you have succeeded at nothing is manager behavior, not "expert" territory.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
OK, I pay for the print edition. Does that mean I get some kind of login to continue using my ad blocker?
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
And just fucking ignore your ads. I don't click on shit. I read the article and leave. How bout that? You still mad? What are you gonna do about that shit?
So $1 a week is doable. I'd be willing to pay $4/mo for any number of high-quality sites (Wired, Ars, NYT, etc. - the biggies). On the other hand, I'd also like to echo many other people in this tread: the problem isn't ads, it's the third-party ads delivered via ad networks via HTML/JS/Flash/etc..
I might still pay the $4/mo to get rid of the ads, but I'd also be fine whitelisting Wired if they served ads first-party that were vetted by Wired staff (like they used to do with print ads). Right now, I'll simply not patronize any site that disallows ad blockers. That's crazy talk, and dangerous to boot.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
It's not like adblocking is illegal.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Doing without wired is like skipping a two day old donut.
Lost in all of this is that people who run software ad blockers probably also run mental ad blockers (in my case, this can not be uninstalled), so our response to the advertising—even if they manage to shove it down our throats—is not going to generate any significant net cash outflow.
For a while, Wired can monetize the increasing number of eyeballs, but then the advertisers will normalize to the newly deflated advertising conversion rate (down 20%? who would have guessed?) and Wired will eventually end up getting exactly the same money as before.
Nice business model you've got there. Shame if anyone connected all the dots.
Barker: Hey, I'd like to interest you in a new business model!
Banker: How does it work?
Barker: You plant a suggestion, then people buy your shit.
Banker: A suggestion?
Barker: A Loud, Noisy, Flashy, Wheezy, Spinning, Popping, Sliding suggestion.
Banker: I think you missed a dwarf. Somebody steal your March?
Barker: Him, too.
Banker: But—the suggestion isn't actually binding on the bumpkin, and surely you must give them something in return just to get their attention in the first place?
Barker: Cheaper than you think.
Banker: But—I'm still having trouble with the fundamentally non-binding nature of the transaction.
Barker: A new day, a new dawn! We'll make this Silverado shitstorm so ubiquitous, it'll soon become regarded as a moral crime to respond to our everlasting fusillade of suggestive schlock as anything less than simply irresistible.
Banker: You certainly have big plans.
Barker: And you certainly have big bucks.
Banker: I won't have to actually drive a Silverado, will I?
Barker: Oh, no. You can drive a Bentley.
Banker: Funny you say that. I was looking at one just the other day.
Barker: A red one?
Banker: Just how would you know that?
Short, conspiratorial silence.
Barker: [whispers] Pull up a chair, here's where it gets real interesting ...
Good, now I can stop wasting my time trying to scroll through their garbage layout that doesn't work for shit without javascript enabled.
Good riddance.
Well like many other outsourcers, they are.
If advertising is so important to their business, then they should have maintained adequate control over it. They could have contracts with guarantees for quality, security, and penalties for failure to meet them. At the end of the day someone has to take responsibility for the advertising.
Ads are dangerous these days.
Ad sellers don't vet the ads at all. It's basically begging for malware to be installed on your machine.
Static ads won't be blocked. Go back to static ads.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Bear in mind that ad.example,com is not necessarily from the same anything as www.example.com.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If the content is soooo special that they feel the need to rape my computer before I see it, the site can require a subscription or dedicated app. Clicking a link is not an agreement on my part to accept any and all conditions of the site in order to view the content. Clicking a link is the beginning of a negotiation for exchange of data. A negotiation that I will leave if third party scripts, third party ads, tracking cookies, or flash content are requirements.
file:
...more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads.
Does that mean they have less than five readers a day, or is that ad-blocking reader a very heavy Wired-user?
If the content is soooo special that they feel the need to rape my computer before I see it...
That's fine, but keep in mind that this isn't a situation where the context exists whether it's paid for or not. Here's the context of the post I was responding to:
How is selling ads "abusing" them? The whole damn point of the enterprise is to make some jingle.
This person is correct. Some of the discussion on this topic has gone down the path of: "The internet existed before ads!" While true, we're also very much enjoying the content that ad-revenue is bringing us today, ignoring that fact will not lead to a proper negotiation with the content producers to show some sensibility when it comes to monetizing our eyeballs.
*sigh* I'm getting old. I just know somebody's going to respond to my post as if I'm defending malware-spewing sites when clearly I'm not.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, I'll just sue them for hosting ads containing or linking to malware.
this isn't a situation where the context exists whether it's paid for or not.
I'm not sure I'm following this part. This isn't a chick/egg situation. If there is no content, I have no reason to go to a site. If I don't go to a site, I don't care what ridiculous requirements they think they can impose on me to see their lack of content. If there is content, but the rules for seeing it are too much of a burden on me, then it might as well not exist.
Say some new site pops up. They have to have some reason for people to go there. They could offer samples of their content, they could make note of some famous writer that is working for them, they could have agreements for exclusive content from some company/industry/whatever. It doesn't matter what their angle is, any time I type their URL in the address bar, or click a link that goes there, we are starting a new negotiation for data exchange. If I don't like the rules they impose, I am free to leave. If content producers want to wall off their content, whether it's ads, scripts, flash, requiring an app be installed, cookies, or some other restriction, they are also free to do that
The whole damn point of the enterprise is to make some jingle.
This person is correct. Some of the discussion on this topic has gone down the path of: "The internet existed before ads!" While true, we're also very much enjoying the content that ad-revenue is bringing us today, ignoring that fact will not lead to a proper negotiation with the content producers to show some sensibility when it comes to monetizing our eyeballs.
I'm familiar with the history of how content on the internet has been financed. I also enjoy the increased amount of content that is available when compared to 1996. That said, there has to be some better way than what we have now. There is no content that is worth the drain created by scripts, trackers, flash, and the like.
file:
Goodbye Wired.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Found recently at Forbes.com ... Hi again. Looks like youâ(TM)re still using an ad blocker. Please turn it off in order to continue into Forbesâ(TM) ad-light experience.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
If 20 percent of your traffic goes elsewhere many more will follow to the new spot.
You suc to begin with.
The Disconnect tool tells me 35 different sites, most definitely difficult to associate directly with Wired's core business, are informed every time I visit wired.com. Of those 35, my blockers stop 11. What about the other 24? From where I sit, it would seem to me that Wired is already heavily monetized even with conventional ad blockers engaged.
It's up to them to fully explain what those partnerships are really about before I pony up anything more than I already have. Transparency, Wired, is the name of the game. 'Fess up.
How long before Wired.Com files for bankruptcy?
Wired is absolute garbage. Good luck with your new plan guys. I stopped visiting long ago. RIP.
If ads are served after the content, which must be true if they want to appear in Google results, then it follows that an appropriate extension will always be able to block the ad, and the adblocker blocker, and...
It's a strategy which can't win in the long run.
My Stack Overflow user
Wired's content isn't worth a penny anymore. The odd time I read content there I often feel dirty and ashamed of myself for wasting time on such obvious drivel.
Advertisers should be forced to pay for end user bandwidth wasted on adverts.
Until you start turning every webpage into a freaking tabloid.
...I'll unblock you in AdBlock.
It's just too bad that there's no way I'll ever whitelist your ad servers in NoScript.
I guess we'll see how "polite" your ads really are.
There's one street near Northgate that I know of that has 1 Gbps CenturyLink, but with much of the city blocked from upgrading of phone and cable equipment and wiring due to the Director's Rules, many people are still stuck with POTS lines.
Don't give up on them. This is a challenge. That is what every blockage is.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
wired content, laced with sponsored stories is not particularly worthy 1usd a week... maybe 5usd a year would be allright with me for the rare occasion they do publish something quality... and yes by all means I couldnt care less if most of their employees are gone...
Out of curiosity I went to Wired.com. Probably been there a few dozen times ever, at most. I thought I want to like them. I saw an article, "How to Customize Your Sound System for Your Living Room."
Being a music and audio lover, I opened the article. In the 3rd paragraph I was shocked, shocked! to read:
"A square room with minimal obstructions between speaker and listener is most ideal..."
"Someone is wrong on the internet!" (kxcd #386)
It is soo wrong...okay, putting speakers or any sound source in a square room results in echoes that bounce back forth between walls, called standing waves. Just google "acoustics standing waves." A square room is horrible. A sphere is the worst. Non-parallel walls and ceiling-floor are best.
Basically, it confirmed what I thought: Wired may have some decent articles, but like like most magazines and internet magazines, Sturgeon's Law applies. What? Oh...Google Sturgeon's Law! Geesh.
Honestly I'm surprised that every site that relies on ads hasn't been doing this for years now. As usual they're all far behind the times.
Not that I think it's a good idea, obviously if ads are being blocked it's because the ads are a disease, not because we just like installing random browser add-ons.
Stop abusing users and your advertisements won't be blocked. I just won't read wired if wired won't *fix* it's advertising to be less abusive to me.
They say they'll only serve "polite" ads. What that means is anybody's guess, but popover autoplay videos, ridiculous bloat on mobile, and driveby Russian keyloggers are all rude, so sure, why not? I'll disable my adblocker on Wired to give them the benefit of the doubt. The industry needs to change, it needs to make *this* change, so let's participate in the experiment. ..but if my security software makes *one* peep, you're outta here, Wired.
Should users just get their own systems infected because of the advertisements?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I don't want to see ads ever. If I visited a site like wired every day then I could see myself paying, but I don't, I only ever follow the occasional link there. Some kind of multi-site micropayment service might work quite well - something like a spotify subscription where the money from my subscription is distributed to the content provider that I visit, proportional to the number of visits. Not perfect but if one provider ducks behind a paywall I just stop visiting, if they all disappeared then I'd probably pay.
$52/yr? is that what a user earns them in ad revenue?
I whitelist some sites, if their ads aren't too overwhelming or intrusive. Wired.com isn't one of those.
If you had tasteful ads, they wouldn't be blocked. Get tasteful ads and this will not be an issue. There problem solved!
Let's see how they do when they lose a lot of those 20%...
The amount of money they are asking for is way out of line. The amount of revenue that they get from ads from one user is probably around $1/YEAR, not $1/week. And the ads are far too intrusive.
Give me a site with quiet ads - no Flash, no auto-play video, no sound, no pop-overs, no interstitials - and I'll think about unblocking it. Until then, bye-bye.
Don't ad blockers have a mode whereby they download the ad (so the advertiser considers it as having been served) but doesn't show it to the user, thereby killing two birds with one stone: the server thinks the ad has been served, but the viewer never sees the ad.
Wasn't it Forbes that required users to disable their ad-blockers, and then served up ads laced with malware? Wired isn't worth paying for (I did for years, but it's just old and tired now) and it's ESPECIALLY not worth the risk of having my PC hacked.
You can buy a subscription to Wired in print for $20/yr -- which includes access to the tablet version. Why would anyone choose to pay $52/yr for just the online articles, when they could get the tablet version for less than half that amount, and just recycle or donate the paper magazines if they don't want them? Silly. I think Wired will have to rethink this very soon.
WIRED you are dead to me.... "we will keep the ads as “polite” as we can" my ass....
Why would I pay $1 per week, $52 per year, when I can get the print version delivered to my home (with only printed ads) for about $12 a year? Currently Wired is offering 6 issues for $5.
They asked me to unblock their advertisements, can click to go to site here - then it took me right back to the same page, same error... repeat. Close tab.
Tired: Ad blocker blockers
Why do/did they think they can just outsource their ads for their online product?
Because directly courting advertisers and vetting every ad adds overhead to a process which already isn't that profitable.
Perhaps they shouldn't be in business then. Is it our responsibility to make certain that Wired or Forbes stay afloat? Additionally, outsourcing the product makes the process more flexible; ads can be quickly tested and swapped out for better performing adds.
Which of course, is a whole hellava big part of the problem. You know, a lot of us would just be happy if they didn't infect our computers with malware. Or do they have to do that too?
I'm sure there are other benefits to outsourcing ads too.
Like no need for an advertising department?
I'm not defending online advertising practices. I'm just saying that there's a good reason that things evolved into the current state of affairs. It's hard to find a solution without really understanding the problem.
The problem stated in it's simplest terms is that the amount of advertising, and it's intrusion and interacting with itself and the malware that accepting the advertising puts on your computer has reached the point where not only geeks, but normal people are installing it.
To make it even shorter, present day webertising is killing itself.
Understanding the problem means being able to answer the question you posed without simply dismissing Wired and the likes as idiots.
I'll dismiss them as unable to think beyond the status quo. They are telling me that in order to see their content, I must accept malware onto my computer. It's my computer, and I'll not accept that any more than some stranger knocking on my door and telling me I have to share my wife with him or else he'll go away.
Answers are no, and no. I keep my computer and my wife's integrity, and the guy at the door doesn't get laid, and I don't see any of Wired's content. Or the ads.
The answer in concept is simple. They need to serve their advertisements up in a way that I will consent to watch them. If they cannot place ads any other way than serving them up with a side of malware, and tracking, andspending more time and data for the ads, than the content - well goodbye Wired, not my problem.
As I've noted before, the web is terribly terribly broken. Ad's have broken it, and if as I think you are suggesting, there is no fix - it must be exactly like it is now - the future isn't too bright for places like Forbes, wired, and the whole internet.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Sorry for this naive comment but...How does Wired even know which ads my browser is choosing not to display? Is this not a client-side phenomenon?
I'm distressed at how much info many browsers provide... Do they really announce "HEY WEBSITE I'M RUNNING ADBLOCK!"
STILL failing to address the issue of addresses not in the Hosts file.
STILL lacking basic reading comprehension.
And calling OTHERS 'cretin' on top of that.
So pathetic.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's not a question of whether to have adds. It's that the site owners are selling add space without checking what they are letting on their website. It is their website and they are reponsible for what shows there. Selling a link and saying it is not their fault is not enough, when we are getting abusive or even malicious adds.
Blocking adds is our right, blocking adblockers is their right. But it's better to find a way to exclude malicious and dangerous adds.
In short, clean up your websites or we will clean them for you. If you block us then nobody gets anything.
And I am willing to subscribe to some sites I like, as long as the cost is not too high. This whole thing started because there was not convenient way to pay, but there is now.
I find the internet almost unusable when I have to browse without NoScript or some kind of ad blocker. It's appalling for someone who came from the Arpanet days. *
I go to their sites a handful of times per year, so don't let the doorknob hit you on the ass on yer way out...
Advertisers want your attention, I am not interested in what they are advertising. Frequently the advertisers that caused me to work out how to block them were selling garbage or were little better than scammers. Vibrating adverts, autoplay video adverts, flashing adverts. Perhaps if the advertisers or the web sites hosting them had blocked the bad behavior they wouldn't find themselves in this position now. I guess I will try unblocking sites I really want to be on, if they block me for blocking their irritating adverts. But if the adverts prevent the page from loading or are too distracting then I will happily say goodbye.
Here's the thing. I paid for five years in advance for a monthly subscription up front for the print version of Wired, a magazine I truly loved to read. Then all of a sudden, the magazine turned into worthless crap. Almost overnight, it went from something relevant to pages and pages of ads (which I do understand support the cost of the magazine) and articles that are totally vapid and worthless puff pieces. So now, when my copy of Wired magazine arrives in the mail every month, I just leave it on a visitor's table in the lobby, for someone else to read.
I'm happy to allow ads. Websites need to be funded somehow. You can't expect content for nothing and it sure beats subscribing.
I'm sure Wired readers don't work for nothing. Wired and others provide a service I'm interested in, only fair to pay them with ads.
Stop being arseholes.
I was amused to note that the number of comments on this article was 666. It's intriguing that an article about the spawn of the devil, i.e. ads, should have 666 comments. So to prevent the devil gaining strength and ensuring ads for everyone, I offer this post to bring the number up to 667.
Your welcome.
Ads are already shown on their site and can be shown on their site. Pop up ads are something else and loading content from known bad sources is my right to block.
reprints@condenast.com
submit@wired.com
wiredlabs@wired.com
mail@wired.com
press@WIRED.com
javascript:document.getElementById('veil').setAttribute("display", "none")
run when page loads on wired.com breaks their stupid overlay.