Group items tagged

"Wired recently started an anti-ad-blocking campaign that attempts to prevent ad-blocked users from reading articles unless they pay a monthly subscription fee. On the heels of this decision comes a roundup of the major ad-blockers, some of which are pretty dodgy indeed. Adblock Plus comes off the worst of the lot. The company charges publishers fees to allow their ads through its filters, based on criteria about size and placement. Ghostery blocks trackers, but by default gathers "anonymized" data about your browsing habits (it's very hard to conclusively describe any deep data set as anonymized). "

"Therefore, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page. Of course, while waiting for that consent from a visitor, the site could refuse to show anything, but then the publisher will scare off all readers, even the ones who turn out to be not running anti-ad plugins. If the page is viewable while waiting for the consent, then blocking ad-blockers is pointless."

"Mobile advertising was the great hope for newspapers and magazines, replacing revenues lost in the switch to digital from print. Earlier this year the influential analyst Mary Meeker, of the venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins, had pegged it as a $25bn opportunity in the US alone. Now the hoped-for revenues are in peril, and publishers - and people who care about free, independent news - are rightly worried."