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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Or just block the ad-blocker blocker script. Just like one can do for most of these sites trying to block ad blockers.
Or just wait an hour or two for AdBlock's anti-AdBlock killer list to re-fix their site.
The advertisers need to understand that they really can't win this war - Even if it eventually comes down to letting every single ad and craptastic script on a page run in an invisible sandbox just to pass all their tests, we still won't watch the damned ads.
Find a revenue model that doesn't depend on pissing off your customers, or you deserve to go out of business. Really that simple.
"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.
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.)
Wired can just go fuck themselves if they think their readers should bend over and take this kind of abuse.
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
I've never looked at a 19th century newspaper, but I'mma go out on a limb here...
I'm pretty sure the ads didn't:
1) Make noise.
2) Move around annoyingly trying to get my attention.
3) Make me sit and wait to read the rest of the page while they loaded.
4) Cost me additional money (mobile bandwidth) to load.
5) Report my location & reading habits back to the advertiser as I walked about London.
6) Take up 80% of the page, requiring me to flip page after page to read a sentence or two surrounded by half a dozen ads.
7) Cause an actual danger to me in damaging the device I was using to read them.
Did I forget anything? I'll take 19th century advertising standards.
There's a certain red-on-black alternative social networking site that does advertising right. Hosted on their own server, static simple images, reasonably sized, no animation, no sound, no JScript, no Flash, no BS. They actually host the images on a sub-domain of their main site. It would be trivial to block them. I don't because they're not annoying or dangerous. Occasionally they even advertise something interesting, and I (intentionally!) click/tap on an ad.
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.
Jack of all trades,master of none