I like the idea of paying for subscriptions for no-ad service. However, the $1/week seems a little high. I might read 10 to 20 articles a year on wired.com.
I do pay subscriptions for things that I use (almost) daily: Hulu no commercials version, Netflix, and Google Music.
So, good idea, but I would expect a subscription to perhaps cost $10 to $15/year. Just my opinion...
I'd prefer to pay, say, $10/mo for _all_ the content I read, and that's basically the very upper bound. I figure $120/yr is a much better deal than what they (where by "they" I mean all the news sources I read) are getting from ads right now. I don't click on ads, and brand advertisements don't pay shit.
I am most likely to see a wired article by following a HN link. That texture has some other article that is similar is totally pointless, as it is either the wired article or nothing.
Don't get me wrong, texture is probably doing great things, but until we get copyright changed to include a right to stream any work (subject to payment), such collections will be mostly pointless.
It's completely unlike Google Contributor. Google Contributor keeps Google in the loop and only removes _Google_ ads if you win an auction. All other ads keep shitting all over your page. This would let you disable _all_ ads, yet still pay the publisher.
Fixed buffet-style fee would be difficult. Per-page micropayments, however, could be accomplished with some form of blockchain (probably not Bitcoin though, it's collapsing under its own weight as it is), perhaps with an extra layer of anonymization to get rid of tracking. The problem with micropayments is greed: publishers think their content is worth vastly more than it really is.
If I knew how to do buffet-style scheme for this without involving things like carrier billing and DNS tracking, I'd be working on my own startup RFN. This could undo the likes of Google and FB and make the web a much better, and much more private place.
Indeed. You can subscribe to digital-only Wired for $19.99 anywhere in the world, and in the US it includes a print copy too.
I'd consider a $1/week if it covered all Conde Nast publications, or a significant portion of the internet. By that logic, though, I'd prefer if a subscription to Texture (Next Issue) or other content services included free access to the affiliated websites without ads. It adds up quick, but even the weekly version works out to $3.46/week for basically every magazine I'd care to read...
Of course ... I'm just saying this. I actually don't read magazines. But I'd pay for a subscription, especially if I could share it with family.
Wired is one of those mags you can easily get a subscription for under $5. Free subs used to be pretty common too. My current subscription goes till something like 2024 due to stacking a bunch of free or cheap subscriptions together. $1/week makes no sense.
> So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker.
Good luck with that, Wired.
The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation.
While you may think that you don't care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.
I don't see this ending well for any party involved.
They may very well be in for a rude surprise. You can bet they will roll this out with a big name writer's article (Neal Stephenson has written for wired before, that would be a good candidate) to maximize the conversion. If they start it out with a bunch of junk they'll effectively tell people 'save your money'.
Don't view ads. Wired doesn't care about you. You contribute nothing back anyway.
So by making it a little harder, at least some of those people with morals will be pushed in the right direction to pay or white list ads for free content.
They are asking, please stop using our content without giving something back. We need something from you to continue. Here are two options. Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok.
The response is, we'll weaponize and win.
Or excuses about how I don't contribute anything but might bring in someone who does, so how dare you. You are going to fail.
These are not evidence based arguments. It's not to hard to block Ad Block users.
Other media companies have survived with paywalls AND ads.
And even if it doesn't work out, Wired can pull back and at least say they tried.
It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral. The glee at that they might fail. This can be read both above and below the lines.
> Payment, or ads that we'll try and keep ok. The response is, we'll weaponize and win.
You really got to realize this is not about showing ads, ie. some plain jpg/gifs--which a lot of people would accept--but loading tons of tracking scripts that slow you down and violate your privacy. So yeah, I'm gonna protect against that, I don't deem it as an acceptable choice.
They could come up with a better payment option. They could accept micropayments of some sort. Even an anonymous deposit-based system. Then they could quote me an ad-auction based price, and give me the option of entering an account number and password.
>They are asking, please stop using our content without giving something back.
They are asking to violate your privacy by feeding your personal information to an ad network. If they were clear about the exchange they expected (personal info for articles), then people wouldn't be so harsh on them. It's pretending that their proposition is just seeing a little ad that's misleading to the point of being immoral.
>It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral
I wouldn't call people being upset that wired has made this anti-privacy decision to force people into an all or nothing subscription self-righteous because it's not unfounded. This is a big middle finger to anyone who cares about privacy.
Exposure IS worth something and a business that pays a team of analysts and other professionals ought to be in a position to access this and decide accordingly. In this case in the long run something is better than nothing which is what wired will end up with.
As a publication they have little to offer to justify their high subscription cost and the portion of people interested in tech who don't use an ad blocker will eventually be the empty set.
Alternatively they could offer tasteful text and image ads served from their own domain and many people would be willing to allow them.
I'm enjoying the meta - ad machine that sometimes writes about ads writing about its own new ad plans.
So tech is having a shake-out at the moment - many assumptions being questioned, many business models being challenged, many unicorns revealed as dead horses.
Considering how little of genuine value these businesses contribute - including Wired - I'm not sure they're going to be heavily mourned if they disappear.
Is anyone really going to mind much if the Distraction Economy dies over the next few years?
You might take a moment to consider that some of us who block ads are more concerned about the morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than we are the revenue some arbitrary site may or may not lose from missing our impressions before you start casting stones wildly about like that.
I'd probably be very willing to consider whitelisting sites who worked with advertisers that didn't run tracking programs most of the Three Letter Agencies in the West would kill to access — if they didn't already have behind-the-scenes arrangements with them. But that question is probably pretty moot at this point, isn't it?
When they give me a way to, yes, I actually do. I pay for recurrent subscriptions, plural, to sites that offer and warrant it. At least one of them has been running for a decade or more.
Regardless, calling it a "crusade" is the same kind of argument-poisoning that the GP uses with his "people with morals" quip. If you can't have a discussion without resorting to that kind of rhetoric — term used very damned loosely — then, personally, I don't think you've got much of a point.
"crusade: lead or take part in an energetic and organized campaign concerning a social, political, or religious issue."
Apparently using correct words is now argument poisoning charged rhetoric.
Okay.
Sorry if you don't like when the definitions of words match what you are doing.
"If you can't have a discussion without resorting to that kind of rhetoric — term used very damned loosely — then, personally, I don't think you've got much of a point."
Let's look at who is using rhetoric here:
"morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than "
"Yes, if the content is good enough to warrant paying for a subscription.
"
So if it's not, you just view it anyway?
"Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade.
"
It's pretty rich to make a moral argument the way the parent did and have a problem with a term like crusade, which is a precise and correct term to describe this.
> > "Yes, if the content is good enough to warrant paying for a subscription. "
> So if it's not, you just view it anyway?
Yes, because I decide what authors and publications I choose to support based on what they publish. You might think I'm "taking free samples too far", but you can always flick through a magazine before buying it in a store -- what is the difference here? Paying for a publication when you have no idea what they produce is just being a bad consumer.
> > "Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade. "
> It's pretty rich to make a moral argument the way the parent did and have a problem with a term like crusade, which is a precise and correct term to describe this.
Well, to be fair GP made a similar moral argument, so I guess they also have a crusade?
"Wired doesn't care about you." isn't true at all. Just because a person who is blocking ads may not generate any revenue directly, they may share the article with someone who doesn't block ads.
Losing 20% of their audience may have really painful effects on their reader network.
$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good. OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more reasonable than asking me to pay for everything.
Right. I don't read $1 worth of Wired per week. That page I just read was worth maybe $0.001 (and that's being generous). Generally, I'd be happy to match forgone ad income. I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.
> I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.
When I read the price, I immediately wondered "what are they doing to my computer with those ads that they're making $52 a year when I read maybe four stories a year?"
Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices. One thing they're not taking into consideration is that you're a lot more likely to click on an article if it costs you nothing but time. For many readers, even $1 a year isn't a good value.
> Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices.
It's a dead-wood mindset, I think. Sure, I like to read a Wired article now and again. But I don't regularly hit their site. I go there based on search results, links, and so on. There are too many sites at that level for me to bother following. Let alone subscribing.
I get that $52 isn't very much. Not for me, that is. But it is for many readers. And so it's not a good choice for a basic subscription. If they don't want to bother with per page pricing, they could at least offer multiple subscription levels.
I'd love to see a widespread adoption of micro payment schemes. It looks like BT could make that quite easy to do. I don't know the technical aspects of what a system like that would entail, but it could unlock gated articles, serve as a voluntary tip jar, or even a system where a preset amount of tokens/coins get distributed evenly across the participating sites a user visits.
I'd buy into your idea with one addition: A "Refund" button at the bottom of the article that I can click to get my money back if the content ended up being low quality. That's a "No questions asked, no arguments given" refund, and it is my sole judgement as to what constitutes crappy quality.
That might buy the publisher (a) some credibility, and (b) an incentive to publish decent quality articles and not clickbait headed by misleading summaries.
Might some people abuse it? Sure. Probably. But I think that a large majority would not. Most of us do get it that people need to get paid.
The refund option isn't fair for the publisher. When you visit a restaurant do you get a refund if you don't like the food? Or a theater? I don't need a refund, if I pay for a few articles and they prove to be crap I won't visit the medium again. Besides we're talking about cents here, it's not like you bought a Picasso only to realize after a couple of months that you don't really like it.
> When you visit a restaurant do you get a refund if you don't like the food? Or a theater?
Weeeell, some people do exactly that (and have done since the beginning of time, as popularized in folk songs). The iOS AppStore does that, and that's also "pennies". Amazon does that. It's no small part of their success.
It's a question of self-belief. A seller who is confident about the quality of his delivery will not mind guaranteeing refunds, because chances are that very few people will take him up on it. Considering your costs are pretty much the same whether you serve 10,000 or 1,000 webpages, it doesn't really matter if you get 9,995 or 995 refunds.
I think you have a good point, but I would liken it to: If I go to a restaurant, and they give me raw chicken, then no, I'm not going to give them my money.
I guess, it's a bad analogy, as food that makes you sick is easier to discern than "shoddy article with no journalistic integrity"
Maybe if it was implemented in a different way, like a running tally for a month for which you are billed. You read an article, then decide whether or not you are willing to pay for that article. At the end of the month you get a bill for the amount that you agreed to. Kind of like the 'pay what you will' but with a set asking fee per article.
I have found out that I try and access a Forbes article about once a week from my cellphone. I've also found that I don't care about any of the links enough to whitelist it. I haven't shared a Forbes link with anyone since then.
Exactly. I for one will be one of the people who will stop visiting the page altogether since it doesn't provide that much of a content for me personally.
Why would Wired care about people that use ad blockers and never visit their site again? They're really no value to Wired so why expend resources on them? I have no problem adding Wired.com to my whitelist because I enjoy their articles.
>I don't see this ending well for any party involved.
I would get used to this. Ad blockers are relatively easy to defeat and if that 20% figure starts getting higher we'll start to see more and more sites employ these countermeasures.
>Why would Wired care about people that use ad blockers and never visit their site again? They're really no value to Wired so why expend resources on them?
Blocking users that use ad blockers and will never visit their site may potentially block a significant chunk of their intended audience. That audience may then share interesting articles with others who are not running ad blockers. I would assume that the cost of serving a single article to a portion of users who will not view ads may be insignificant in comparison.
Blocking a significant chunk of their audience that doesn't pay for the content they produce, in any way, while expending their resources is of little concern to sites that make their money from advertising.
I can only see this as an act of desperation. They can't possibly think people are going to sign up for $1/mo subscriptions ... they must know that will happen fewer than 1000 times ever.
The other half - restricting their content from the exact audience that they supposedly represent ...
I feel sorry for them - they must be completely backed in a corner with no good options.
Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG. Good luck building a general-purpose image parser & modifier, especially on a webpage with embedded animations.
There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.
This might happen. But I can tell you there will be some very vocal opposition to this (users of screen readers for instance, and anybody living in a country with accessibility laws will be very happy to give you merry hell).
A monolithic PNG wouldn't have annoying animated ads or videos that push down content, they wouldn't pop over. They wouldn't be serving malware since it would come from wired. I would miss the ability to select text, but I wouldn't be bothered by the ads anymore.
Maybe now if they served a canvas element, and put all the content in that with animated ads, that would be more bothersome.
I always wondered why didn't youtube concatenate the ad content directly to the main content stream. It should be possible without reencoding and maybe a minimal muxing overhead (hell DASH is not even multiplexed). It would be quite hard to block that.
If somebody did that monolithic PNG a bunch of hackers would see it as a challenge and there would be a "Show HN: how to get around wireds new png system" within a week.
As everyone else has said, I would prefer that (if I were browsing with no filtering).
Here's the trivial client blocking method: OCR and break the result into different groups by page location, font size and color; the article will be the largest groups of text with the same font. Large images and charts that were part of the original article would be cropped out and re-inserted into the final document. Within a few days you would see a browser extension made with adaptable filtering for most sites that used the monolithic PNG.
Exactly. The best part is it doesn't even need to be blocked in the client. I'm running Pi-Hole:https://pi-hole.net/ with DNS Crypt:https://dnscrypt.org/ on a couple of Raspberry Pi 2s on my network acting as internal caching name servers. Sure, I also run uBlock, but I don't even see ads on mobile apps because they're all blocked via DNS long before the client even has to parse it.
There's no war. It's simple. I choose what I allow to run on my computer. End of story. It's the height of arrogance that all of these companies, both the publishers and the ad tech firms, think they can do whatever they want to users with no recourse. I bought the computer to serve my needs, I have control over how it functions to do so.
But if your usage of your computer that you bought depends on their servers, it seems they would have some sort of say in how you use it.
That is, they can negotiate with you using your desire to access their servers as leverage.
You can refuse to negotiate, in which case they can take steps to block your access to their server. You can use technological means to get around that, but then they can adjust their own technology to block your new strategy.
There's a reason why protocols (such as HTTP) intended for use in the public space refer to a client connection as a "request". I am asking them for a specific set of data, they are welcome to choose whether to provide it or not. Once I've received it, and it's on my computer, I get to choose whether or not to let it run. In the case of advertisements, I have more security concerns than mere annoyance, so I choose to block them. If you don't wish to serve me content, go right ahead, just be aware that there is nothing you can do to force me to expose my system to your potentially malicious advertisements.
I wasn't saying that you're obligated to look at ads. I said that if you want to use someone else's servers AND want to block ads, you're going to end up in a technical war.
You said "there is no war", but obviously there is.
Your choices are:
* use the servers and look at ads
* don't use the servers at all
* use the servers and try to block ads
In this third option (which seems to be the one you chose), the people who own the servers can then try to block your access to the site. You can then try to circumvent that block, then they can try to block you again.
This is a war. You said "there is no war".
The subtext here is that, grand proclamations about sovereignty over your computing devices aside, by making other people's servers a crucial component of your computing you are ceding to them some leverage and therefore control.
I guess we're talking past each other. You're of the impression that I'm going to try to circumvent them refusing to serve me content while I'm blocking ads. I'm not. I have no reason to. They have every right to refuse to let me view their content for any reason they choose, and I have every right to not run arbitrary scripts they serve me on my computer.
There is no war, because I'm not going to fight. I'm going to viciously restrict what runs on my system to protect my own security and privacy. If that makes some services or sites become unavailable to me, so be it.
And this is where wired missed the boat here, the article should not have been titled 'how wired will deal with ad blocking' but it should have been 'how wired will deal with tracking'.
If that's how they think they should probably take a class explaining network effects and how the ability to share a link can help spread their product.
If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't write the articles.
At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.
I hope you did not think that the advertisers aren't capable of running a little estimation program on all those clicks going 'in' to wired that did not result in the displaying of an ad tag?
If there is any party that is aware of how many people on wired's web property are running an ad blocker it is the advertising networks.
Wired is not telling them that they get 'XXX'k traffic per time unit, they're being told what their traffic is and what percentage of them has an ad blocker installed.
I hope the advertisers realize that we have not even come close to hitting a critical mass of people that install adblockers in the first place. I am amazed by how many people don't run adblockers. I tell everyone I know to run them... Remember it is only 1 out of 5 right now... It will be much higher as the tech illiterate are taught how to install them.
The truth is, I can always just go outside. Go for a run, Go for a hike with my kids... collect some rocks, smash rocks looking for geodes, play catch, play hide and go-seek, cook, drink. All will be much better than me sitting on my computer reading articles on Wired.com
Not to mention they lose all the viral follow-on effects. If Jane never reads another article of theirs, then Jane never shares another article of theirs, and never refers a new reader or subscriber, and on goes the cascade multiplied by however many people stop reading. They end up cutting off their own oxygen.
The people commenting here that Wired doesn't need to care about ad-blocking readers, are entirely ignoring this critical element. It's a big component of how new people get introduced to Wired.
No, they cannot say that they have xxx users per day/month/year, the reports of the adservers are the one that are read by the advertisers (and the editors), the number of visitors is useless if you can't serve them ads.
Actually, this can almost completely wipe out Wired from google search results.
One metric that is used to rank sites is the bounce rate. If ad blocking users simply go back to Google and look for another result, then they will get penalised by Google.
Most of the content I read comes through places like HN. If Wired loses many of the more active participants on HN (who are probably more likely to run adblockers), their articles will get posted less and upvoted less, so they'll lose many of the people who aren't running adblockers too. Would be very interesting to see how much impact those active participants have overall on their readership - my guess is it's a lot.
Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess.
If you feel $1 per week ($50 / year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired's are worth CPM rates that you'd probably not believe.
Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it.
This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will survive the transition, at the same time they don't seem to understand that to lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience (that high?). After all, it wasn't the users that decided to substitute 'ads' with 'tracking', 'visual garbage' and 'malware' it was the properties and the advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.
But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made 'advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card' into their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.
Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your adblocker that you won't be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.
I've seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to never want to disable all my ad blockers, we'll see if there is a wired article that pushes me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the cut.
Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not rely on a centralized entity.
$1 per week doesn't seem like a lot when phrased that way. But when you think about all of the sites your adblocker blocks ads from on a daily basis, if it'd add up a lot of they all charged $1. I'd be ok with not consuming a good bit of content and paying for the small few I like, but I'm not sure that's sustainable. It'll be interesting to watch.
Micropayments, however, will never work. The main problem is that the jump from no payment to $1 is the biggest hurdle. If you can get someone to pay anything at all, you can probably get the to pay more than micropayment amounts, so your optimum payment is never a small one.
Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario into account.
Wired figures that if you read any of their content at all you owe them $50 / year and that's an 'all you can eat' figure. So if you read all the articles they have that's a bargain, if you read only one then you might as well skip that one and the next and take your s.o. out for dinner.
A micropayment system would reduce the need for such calculations, it would allow a pay-as-you-go model which is far more effective for impulse buys such as articles.
All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to collect micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to pay them.
They haven't found a killer app yet. This seems like a ripe moment for them to shine. I'd be all over micropayments like a cheap suit if it let me read any article on any service I wanted, ad-free.
You'd think so... I signed up for flattr (https://flattr.com/) with some credit shortly after they launched. Over half a year, I found one website (https://lightspark.github.io/) I went to which wanted to receive my money (and they did). Everybody else served ads (which I blocked).
Hell, putting a bitcoin address on my blog gave me actual couple of cents. :)
Clicking on a Gittip/Flattr/Patreon badge or looking up a donation Bitcoin address are always worth a sad chuckle.
That you've given out a whole schmeckle in a year isn't much of a counterpoint.
It's like when someone would tip you $0.002 on Reddit back when people still used CoinTip: insult for the receiver while making the giver feel like they made a difference -- altogether a net negative for the world.
I wouldn't judge B addresses by looking them up. I cycle mine once in a while, I'm pretty sure others do too.
Why are you being so negative about donations? Some pick up, some don't. I don't see anything negative about even minimal donation. It means someone actually cared enough to do anything. I'd be happy to receive a $0.002 tip for some content I created - and not because it makes any difference to my account.
Micropayments can be as automatic as ad auctions. Publishers would just give readers the option of winning the auctions for all ads on the page. Most simply, payments could come from deposit accounts for readers.
I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone. Just that the friction of paying for anything at all, assuming a reasonable level of security, is such that if I'm willing to pay $.01 I'm probably willing to pay $1. If I'm willing to pay $1 I'm more than 20% likely to be willing to pay $5. So the optimal pricing strategy would never be a micropayment.
This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count free-to-play gaming where, for some reason, people refer to a $14 average purchase as a micropayment.)
If it were possible to lower the friction while maintaining security, that presumably would already be the case, as there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers.
The most successful micropayment service of can think of is probably Spotify. It doesn't look how everyone was imagining micropayments but is effectively the same thing.
"there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers"
At least up until now, there have been ad sales, which you can think of as an incredibly heath-robinson micropayment system: a small amount of what I pay for every product I buy goes to their marketing department, which passes on a smaller amount to advertising firms, which give it to websites. The viability of advertising largely removed the incentive to develop micropayment systems; hopefully that's now changing.
I always thought of micropayments as being like 1cent or less, like a small enough amount to be forgettable for even the stingiest people. And to somehow make it effortlessly simple to pay, so it's closer to an impulse purchase. There's a lot of friction associated with finding a credit card and punching in numbers and an address.
I'm already using Google Contributor, and have apparently effectively paid amounts from less than a cent to $0.35 to various sites I've visited in the last month or so, and all for $5 a month. Seems like a better way to handle paying for content than signing up for subscriptions individually with dozens of sites.
21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way.
You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms, but for the small amounts you are mining that really doesn't matter. The benefit is having (a small amount of) money put onto your device without you having to make any effort at all and replenished over time. There will also be the ability to specify a threshold below which money can be transferred from your device to a website without your authorisation. So you might specify 1 cent a webpage (for a collection of high quality sites) that you're happy to pay without constantly having to press an “ok” button.
This will then deliver a very low effort system for micro-paying websites requiring very little need for attention and management from the user, effectively automatically paying websites with device-generated digital currency rather than with attention/exposure to ads.
That seems like the worst of all worlds. Mining on a desktop computer just barely works, but I'll be damned if I want my laptop's fan to spin up all the time just so I can tip some web site. And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery. And considering the current BTC price, I'd burn like $3 for every $1 gained.
Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there) and then have a browser plugin that reacts to a payment challenge (either HTTP 402 or some meta-tag) and presents me with a native chrome button that can't be spoofed by site JS. And add a whitelisting option for something like The Guardian where I currently pay a monthly fee.
You would not be mining on a computer's CPU (or GPU). You would be mining on a dedicated ASIC chip (that is already in production).
> And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery.
Which I why I specified in my comment that you could limit the mining chip to running only when the device is plugged into the wall (e.g. when you charge the battery overnight).
> Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there)
That's how I use my Paypal account. I top it up occasionally by transferring money from my real bank. Paypal has usually the equivalent of about USD100 and it does NOT have my credit card number.
I would be quite happy to use Paypal for micropayments but I haven't seen anything yet that works and asks for a small enough amount to qualify as micropayment.
Besides it being utterly ridiculous to have a mining chip in your computer, you are ignoring that Bitcoin is terrible for micropayments.
1) The blockchain can handle approximately 3 transactions per second, which if actually spread evenly across the day (which they wouldn't be), it can handle around 260,000 transactions per day. A website like the New York Times does over 1MM unique per day.
2) In order to get settlements on your transactions, you have to pay a fee or else miners will ignore you. Current fees are around the equivalent of $0.04 USD. So your 1 cent transaction will not only bound up the network, but also cost you 5 cents to actually get processed.
Bitcoin is not now, nor will it ever be, a feasible solution for micropayments. And the ridiculous 21.co mining rig is even more ridiculous of a solution.
Their $1 per week only says that they won't serve ads to you as well, it says nothing about all of the other rubbish that still tracks you but doesn't display ads.
spot on. i wrote and gave them feedback saying i was happy to show their ads, but i do not consent to being tracked. their ads are only blocked because privacy badger blocks them due to tracking. no tracking, ads are shown.
I wonder why content website don't use Canvas rendering in order to block all ad-blockers. You either see the canvas, with ads in it or don't see anything at all. There need to be a compatible ad-network as well. Accessibility is going to be an issue but if you can solve all of that there is a startup idea right there!
As a user, that would certainly turn me off. The entire page being in canvas fundamentally breaks native functionality. Text selection, copy/paste, navigation keys. Most of these could be simulated but it would never feel truly native.
Heck, I get annoyed when on Snopes simply because I can't select any text (which I use to keep my place in the article).
It's interesting that you hit on this solution which most likely has been debated in many a boardroom of companies that see these ad blocker figures ever on the rise.
The problem is that this 'solution' is not really a solution. It degrades the web to a fraction of its original use case and it would indicate a drastic departure from the open standards that got us here in the first place.
In a war - if you want to end it - the idea is to de-escalate. A reasonable first step from a property such as wired would be to demand from their ad-tech providers that they get rid of any tracking code and other trickery in their ad tags and that the ads served would be simple imagery rather than flash and/or javascript ads that leak an enormous pile of sensitive data about you to the 'supply side platforms'.
But since that would go hand-in-hand with a reduction in effectiveness they would then have to de-rate their ad prices or they would have to live with less income. It appears that wired would rather self destruct or at a minimum force users to convert directly at rate card prices (a win for them if they do in signfificant numbers) rather than go down this route. Time will tell if it is the winning move.
Computer vision has made great strides lately; human-level face and object recognition can run on a laptop's GPU in real time. Segmenting a rendered webpage, classifying regions as ad- or non-ad, and overwriting (in a way invisible to your canvas renderer the former, by comparison, is a walk in the park.
The client will always win. Browsers are user agents, not server agents.
As I've said in the past here on HN, the key feature for this will be webassembly. When it becomes possible to easily compile a "custom" version of freetype and do all the rendering into a canvas element, and send the entire "webapp" (really: document with ads) down in a binary blob, everybody that currently depends on advertising will switch to it.
Adblock detection is like client side DRM it copy protects the article from being viewed unless you disable your ad blocker and see ads and get tracked.
There are scripts that foil ad block detection as well. So some people are fighting back.
It reminds me of file sharing sites like bittorrent sites that people use to get DRM free versions of products at risk of having their IP scanned by DMCA bots sending them a C&D letter.
It comes down to when you buy something you don't own it you only buy the right to use it. Now you only have the right to read articles if you get exposed to ads and tracking. If you block ads they can take away your right to read an article.
It is all about rights and how corporations control what you get access to.
Facebook, Google, and others use ads and tracking as well to earn money. Their sites are free at the cost of your privacy rights.
If there's an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-detectors, the latter will win. All of the money and incentives are set up for them to do a better job.
You can't really 'win' with an ad-blocker-detector, you can only win by committing virtual suicide on your website. Eyeballs have value other than just ads, for instance someone might have shared an article in an interesting way or to a well matching demographic which in turn led to a viral effect. Very hard to know which part of your audience is the one instrumental to keeping the flow of traffic up, and 20% is in the danger zone. Keep in mind that Wired's audience is fairly tech savvy and that is precisely the segment that may have caused Wired to be as well respected as they are in the first place. You don't risk alienating that 20% unless you're desperate.
Look, it's easy to wave your hands and talk about viral articles, but fundamentally they will do what they need to in order to stay alive, or be replaced by a company that will. You can have micropayments (failed experiment), subscriptions, or ads. Empirically it seems like ads or other non-monetary consideration (influence, sponsored content, etc) has outcompeted subscription-based models for most content. Given that the "war" is entirely technical & visible to the end user only by the presence or absence of ads, the question is just whether you'll read a publication that has ads, or not. Empirically, the general population will.
(This says nothing about how invasive the ads are).
My contention is that if you want to, you can make ads nearly indistinguishable from "content".
On the extreme side, I would say that I have won this bet already; if you pick up something like the Wall Street Journal and count the number of articles that someone involved wanted printed, you'd find that most of what you're reading is one kind of ad or another.
But there are technical solutions as well. Obfuscation beats machine parsers for at least the foreseeable future.
Forbes has been doing this for a while on its website. (Or, at least for a while it has been detecting the ad blocking-software that I have been using for much longer.) I have basically stopped reading Forbes (which maybe was a good idea on other grounds) and have learned to appreciate stories from competing publications. If Wired doesn't want my eyeballs to visit its site, I'll just stop bringing them there.
Wired is in the business of making money. You don't pay them any money directly, so they make it up by showing you ads. If you're going them to prevent them from making money that way, then they don't give a hoot about your eyeballs.
Correction: they make it up by giving third parties the ability to lift each and every bit of identifiable information available from your browser, to profile you, to sell your demographic information (lat/lon/approximate age/wealth/family situation/etc, etc) to middlemen who will then in turn sell the opportunity to advertise to you in a real time bidding process to the highest bidder, some ad agency that bought campaign inventory.
If it was just the ads I highly doubt there would be any issue at all.
Exactly. If Wired would show me static image ads that do not slow down my browser with scripts and use my bandwidth to track me across the web, I would add them to my whitelist.
Wired may or may not, I don't know. But they are the facilitator for this info. Also, Facebook and Google may have "opt out" procedures, but they've been... less than trustworthy with those in the past, and I simply don't trust them.
And every time I've relented and turned off my ad blocker for a domain, they have made be regret it and I turn it back on (and often never visit the site again).
When will these clueless execs realize that if they didn't abuse our eyeballs they'd have our eyeballs?
They realize it all right. But the money is just too good and the arms race dictates they join in or be left in the dust. It's a hard problem, and I don't think wired has found the answer just yet.
Try switching to Adblock Edge, if for no other reason than it doesn't have the whitelist. No idea if Forbes is on the whitelist. However I use ublock now. (Firefox not chrome also, if it makes a difference)
While there may be some benefit to avoiding free riders, that definitely is not the goal. The goal is to hopefully prevent some new installs of ad blockers with a hope that some of those existing free riders disable their ad-blockers on Wired or pay a subscription.
Let them be the case study and prove all of the "welp, won't go there again" crowd wrong. I have my doubts that that blocking blockers is a wise long term strategy.
As long as the value proposition is there, it will work out for them. I can tell you, for me it is definitely not. In fact, I just feel bad about the opportunity cost (time) of reading one of their articles let alone actually paying to see one.
If I worked at WIRED I'd be very concerned with increasing the quality of content.
> We know that there are many reasons for running an ad blocker, from simply wanting a faster, cleaner browsing experience to concerns about security and tracking software
Sigh, again, these are just the incidentals of ads. I wish everyone was just completely honest about what ads are for: they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. Ads are not some goodwill clever mechanism to keep magazines in business. The purpose of ads is not to keep Wired in business.
That being said, I think Wired is completely in their right to escalate in the adblocking arms race. I just wish that they were honest about the rules of engagement: either you are open to the possibility of acquiring a purchasing need that you did not have until you watched an ad, or you do not read Wired's articles.
> they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad.
I have to take issue with this, sorry. You may not be fully cognizant of your needs at the time you see an ad, and what if an ad tells you something about what you want rather than what you "need"? And who are you to make that call for anyone other than yourself?
While I generally hate being advertised to, there are certainly times when advertising has shown me things I didn't know existed but wanted to buy as soon as I did. Especially in the case of books.
For wired the point is the ad is for them to stay in business. For the company advertising the point of the ad is to sell something. Maybe it is something you want, maybe it is something you don't need,maybe it is showing you need. But this isn't a conspiracy for wired to sell you something you don't need.
It's not a conspiracy, but it's so annoying that nobody speaks about the ultimate purpose of ads. Their ultimate purpose is not Wired. Keeping Wired in business is just one more incidental. If our purpose is to keep Wired in business, there are other ways besides ads.
So, let's talk about the ultimate purpose of ads. Do we endorse that purpose or not? That's the conversation I really want to be having.
No, it's not an incident. It's symbiosis. You know, the thing that we do in order to survive? Nobody cares what you think about WIRED or ads or whatever. We have to make compromises with things that we don't completely agree with and accept that it is our problem and we have to find a way to deal with it ourselves. Because NOBODY else cares. I know it must be hard for a special little snowflake like you to grasp that, but trust me, nobody cares what you think. Nobody will. Advertising is here and it will stay despite what you think. In fact, it will get bigger and bigger and it will play an ever increasing role in our society. We have to find a way to deal with it, acceptable by both parties. And this path does not start with spreading FUD with your self righteous anti-advertising propaganda to whoever will listen to you.
> they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad.
I think those ads definitely exist-- , but I think as well ads can just be a company with a thing, making sure you're aware of that thing.
I presume you enjoy at least some movies. I also presume you have missed movies that you would have enjoyed, because the trailer or whatever never made it to you. Getting that movie trailer or poster to you, and only getting those trailers or posters of movies that you'd like to you, is definitely advertising, but I don't think it's negative advertising.
* If Wired would implement a solution that provides confidentiality to users, following the approach of The Intercept [1], I would have no problem with it.
* If Wired would show me ads I was interested in, I'd be happy to see them (assuming my confidentiality is preserved).
* If Wired would provide a way to pay them without having to go through another website registration and credit card payment process, I'd pay them. I don't have time to register for and pay every website I read using the current systems, and Wired isn't at the top of my list.
If users are so annoyed by part of your website that they are investing time and effort in disabling it, perhaps the problem is with your website.
I'm sure market research has been done. But 52 dollars a year is probably too high a price for an ad free version of wired. I would pay maybe three or four dollars a year, which has to be more money than they would possibly make off of the advertising revenue I would generate in a lifetime.
Prime properties such as wired make really good money on their visitors. The 'average website' makes rather a lot less than that (hence the existence of supply side optimizers).
The online version of the media kit for the wired property:
Has premium display sitting at about $10 CPM and that's not a bad number compared to what I know about this field, the actual rate for a property such as wired would be a little higher than that (-15% agency fees), but not by much so that's a good starting point.
In France we had something called the Minitel, it was basically internet but the wrong way and centralized, you had to pay more or less depending on which website you would visit (you'd dial 36 14 for free content , 36 15 for paid one ... ), it failed because it was obviously the wrong model but it was quite lucrative for "content providers". The phone company directly handled payement so there was no friction or paywall.
I'm not suggesting to go back to that of course, it was dreadful, but it feels like current content providers always try to reinvent the Minitel somehow.
I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering.
After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains and for types of requests/actions on domains, I still don't see any ads but I do see an ever-increasing list of third-party sites Wired is pulling requests from. Given a choice between throwing up my hands and saying "Fine, f*ckit, do whatever the hell you want" and whitelisting Wired's requests to all of (disqus, optimizely, amazon-adsystem, condenastdigital, demdex, typekit, adobetm, chartbeat, cloudfront, doubleclick, googleadservices, googlesyndication, googletagservices, mediavoice, mookie1, omtrdc, outbrain, parsely, scorecardresearch, yldbt and zqtk) plus whatever others would be pulled in were I actually to whitelist, I guess I'll have to do without Wired.
So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that's AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting its own (and yes, I realize it's part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more. My basic reaction to this is that even if I trust Wired and Conde Nast, I don't know that I trust all those other sites like "mookie1," "yldbt," "zqtk" and whatever other obscurely-named domains.
Frankly, were I to see "yldbt" or "zqtk" as a running process or folder name on a system I was working on, I'd immediately rename them and start virus and malware scans.
So I guess my reading of Wired online will suffer much the same fate as my reading of Wired on paper, because while I like seeing occasional items from Wired it's not a daily destination for me, and I'm certainly not coughing up $50+/year for it.
It is crazy what kinds of BS you find when you run something like Little Snitch for OSX. On a fresh install of Firefox before I've had a chance to download adblock, there are two dozen popups requesting outbound connections... most of the time, I have NO idea who is behind the request or what these request really want. This is just the start page... news pages are even worse.
Run some apps with Little Snitch turned on and you see the same thing. Tons of outbound requests to domains that I have never heard of and have no idea what they want on my machine.
I just block everything with reckless abandon. I don't give a shit if my "experience" is degraded.
Frankly, with small kids in the house who I would like to protect to the extent I am able... I am considering installing Pi Hole and whatever else I can find in addition to the spartan whitelist I've set up for them to use via parental controls.
Then add iptables to that list and I think you're set :-) seriously, all due respect to Little Snitch - I've heard a lot of good things about it and I'm sure it's much easier to use than the raw tools. But I doubt it's doing anything that can't be done with tcpdump/iptables.
Maybe, but I haven't found anything as polished as Little Snitch. The level of control is amazingly high. I really don't use it to the full extent with profiles and the like. I set up some basic rules and let it work for awhile, then I pick and choose what to allow/disallow permanently... like a King :P
It's one of the first things I install on my Macs. Worth every penny.
Little Snitch is basically a user-friendly general-purpose application Firewall. When a connection hasn't been whitelisted before, it pop up a dialog box allowing you to accept/reject connection to a host/domain/port permanently/temporarily.
uMatrix does not protect you against 'malicious' connections initiated by non-browser applications. Little Snitch does not provide the fine-grained URI-level filtering that uBlock/uMatrix provide.
Edit: if you have a Mac, Little Snitch is well-worth the money. It is very polished, does the job, and the developers are not greedy (I think I purchased an update once after I started using it in 2007 or 2008).
Funny, I just bought my first RPi in order to run Pi-Hole. It works decently from my daughter's tablet. I enabled it on the router so the whole house is covered, but due to uBlock I hardly ever see ads on computers. The nice thing is having "boring text" instead of colorful ads on tablets makes them a much smaller target for kids to tap on.
I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you deviate from the norm. I didn't want to use Google DNS and instead opted for OpenDNS, plus I wanted my own directory structure, etc...
Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.
It then installs an updater via cron to check for updated lists every week.
As to your experience with speed, I'm kind of surprised. The only time I noticed a speed difference is when I blackholed domains in the hosts file that didn't resolve to a valid web server (i.e. resolving to 127.0.0.1 without having a web server running), and that's the opposite of what you describe. The pi-hole script also installs lighttpd to serve up a placeholder page, and uses some tricks like mod_expire to improve performance.
> who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked
Never mind even getting hacked. Ad providers routinely violate the trust of content providers by activating audio, throwing up full screen overlays and who knows what else. I'm not an expert but I'm given to understand that it's hard for content providers to quality control these sort of ads. The whole delivery system is gamed to a ridiculous degree.
Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection) or privacy concerns.
Simple static ads would render most of these concerns unnecessary, but I doubt there's any incentive to go back to that kind of "outdated" advertising.
I think they just don't want to see ads as intrusive as the ones found these days. Neither do I.
While my main concerns are performance, bandwidth, security and privacy, I don't think that simple static image ads would have led to the widespread adoption of ad blockers we're currently seeing.
In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name it.
Absolutely. The number of people who would still resort to blocking ads if they were non-targeted, static, tastefully done yet clearly recognizable as advertisements, served locally, non-tracking, and non-obtrusive would probably have been negligible. But now there is an entire economy that depends on advertisements that track you and know you and need to be served via third party brokers, because if they didn't they wouldn't sell.
I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the current bubble so something more useful can replace it.
If you put a static ad image hosted on your own server on the page, something like http://wired.com/img/jhfkfhfuhi34cn2.jpg, ad blocker will not be able to distinguish it from other images and won't block it.
There is also common banner dimensions that get blocked, but it is easy to defeat by adding a pixel somewhere that fits into site design.
Problem with this approach is that you can't just slap some random ad network script there and be done with it, no targeted ads, tracking etc - basically everything people don't like and a reason to use ad blockers.
It's amazing why they don't just do this. Part of the reason why is that ad blocking is so easy, so most people will just do it... especially if it has the added benefit of removing the 5 second delay on YouTube videos due to ads.
But I don't care enough to wipe out static in page ads, especially since those don't have the added cost of tracking me anymore than visiting the site does. In short, I still wouldn't like those adds, but I would like them a lot more than the ads I currently block.
Simple static ads that are not huge, distracting or obnoxious, that are delivered free of any script or similar code, and all hosted by the first party. Those are the ads I would probably find acceptable.
They should be able to still do this too; presumably they still have an ad department for the dead tree version of things. That means they have the people in place to sell ads and integrate them into their content. Of course, magazine ads don't really fit your "not huge, distracting or obnoxious" requirement but their ad people can evolve too. There's probably even a business in this for websites/companies that don't have dedicated ad departments.
I don't even require that they be static - I find ads relevant to the content I'm looking at useful sometimes, and particularly for searches I may end up going with something advertised in the results (generally on DuckDuckGo, occasionally on Google and Google Shopping).
What I object to is the cesspool of unidentifiable tracking and god-knows-what-else crud.
The reason blocking is so easy and works so well is because everyone got lazy.
Publishers want ads but don't want to actually do the job of selling them; ads used to be free money, and this is coming to an end.
Ads from their own domain would be a little harder to block, especially because blocking would have to be done on a page-by-page basis (or at least, website-by-website).
Personally, I do not block first-party ads (i.e. ad images served from the same domain as the original content). For me, the point of using an adblocker is to reduce attack surface and tracking opportunities.
I see, of course, that I'm likely not representing the majority of adblock users.
I have ublock myself for privacy concerns, but I install ad blockers on all my relatives computers just because they are trustful and dumb enough to click any shiny green button that says "Download". Otherwise, I have to pull my hair when I look at their computers full of crap, which they can't explain how it got there. If the internet with ads wasn't such a dangerous place, I wouldn't do it in the first place.
Could someone enlighten me why a lot of sites don't only pull in google analytics, but also a handful of other analytics sites like scorecaredresearch or chartbeat?
Sure. Every analytics company tries to differentiate themselves by claiming that they do something the others don't and showing off some pretty charts.
The marketers buy the hype and want all of that. "If I take this pretty chart from here, and that table that from there, and these numbers from over here, I can make a really impressive report!"
And they want to make sure that they're collecting all the data they could possibly be collecting (because they never know when they might suddenly need the last 6 months data about something they never thought of), even though they don't know what queries they want to be able to make.
So they make the developers add all of them, end up with tons of data but very little information, and start talking about 'this big data thing' that could maybe give them answers even though they still don't know what questions they want to ask. And to use it, you just have to add this little snippet of javascript...
It sounds like the points you're making are all negative, but it also sounds like a fairly valid argument to me. Sure marketers add too much js with the allure of big data, but whats the cost? 0.1% of users (hn readers and the like) are annoyed by it? I'd gladly piss off a tiny fraction of my users to better understand the other 99.9%.
Google Analytics is used primarily for internal reporting and analysis. bscorecardresearch is part of ComScore, which is a third-party reporting company. Advertisers often require publishers to provide third-party reports for traffic so that they can validate the ad campaign numbers that the publisher reports. Chartbeat and others can provide supplemental reporting to a publisher if they think that there are gaps with what Google Analytics provides.
Depends on whether it's the site itself that gets hacked, or the ad network. (The latter is going to be a much more valuable target in practice since it allows malware to spread via multiple sites, not just one.)
That depends on whether they hack the site to actually feed the malicious content or just get enough of a foot in to get it linked from an actual hosting location. If what they have is a database hack where they can inject some content but don't have full control, they may be pushing links while trying to get further access.
They're not talking to you or me. If they were, this article would have been "How Wired Is Going to Handle Tracking and Web Cruft" and address the underlying problem causing people to install ad blockers.
I want people to get paid--really I do--but I'm not stepping barefoot into a cesspool of web cruft to do it. Blockers are like putting boots on so you can wade through it safely. Clean up your mess and I don't mind going barefoot.
> We know that there are many reasons for running an ad blocker, from simply wanting a faster, cleaner browsing experience to concerns about security and tracking software.
They sound as though they're trying to accommodate 'us', but the proof will be in what the 'ad-free' experience is really like. I wonder if they're considered a paid RSS feed as an alternative - that would certainly solve much of the issue for many.
> So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that's AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting its own (and yes, I realize it's part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more.
I don't use an ad blocker, but I'm thinking of installing one just for wired, if only to see how they implement this. And because I don't support hiding content from people who don't want to pay with their eyeballs and privacy, or maybe can't pay with money.
I use uBlock Origin. I went onto Wired to see how it worked. I must have viewed about 2 dozen articles, with no side effects. Either they haven't activated this yet, or it doesn't work.
You don't support people not giving their work away for free? I could understand the privacy argument but "some people can't afford that businesses product so fuck that business" seems ridiculous.
I geniunely do feel bad for magazines that are trying to figure out how to survive in a world of ad-blockers. I suspect that many hard-working journalists will lose their jobs as magazines like Wired go out of business. I personally subscribe to several newspapers, and I worry about them, too, and what's going to happen to journalism in this country (USA, sorry for my chauvinism).
BUT!
I want to KILL the free internet--that is, the internet that is paid for with slices of my attention and life. I do believe that advertisers are very good at extracting my attention and money, and I genuinely do want to destroy that internet model. What will emerge? I can only cross my fingers.
Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled content left, and I'll just figure something else out.
They want my money, they're going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop shop option.
No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a week subscriptions, logins, and such just to read articles linked to by Hacker News. Your content just isn't that important to me, sorry.
Not only that but every site that has your payment information could be hacked and someone steals it along with your password, email, and other information.
I like reading sites that don't require a login unless you want to leave a comment. My account was hacked at the Harvard Business Review and I used to leave comments there. They redid their website and limit what you can read now.
Sorry to say websites are moving towards a subscription model and I don't read every article on a website to make it worth the money. Just articles I have an interest in reading. I don't mind ads as long as they aren't annoying. As long as they don't take up a lot of the screen or pop up windows or a new browsing window or pop up a notice to enter my email to subscribe to their newsletter. I want to just read an article with no annoying stuff. Clickbait articles that take up several pages turn me off. Video ads that autoplay turn me off. That is why I installed an ad blocker to get rid of annoying things. I don't mind non annoying ads like Adwords or the typical banner ad.
I wonder if this would be the case for Paypal Subscriptions. I am already using that for a couple of sites, albeit they are with video content. Each is a couple of Euros a month.
So, you wouldn't need to share your payment details with any publisher, but with just one , that distributes it further. This is really similar with the system in place in some countries, when you wanted to get a subscription to a newspaper, a central collecting money company would take your request, invoice you, etc, and distributed the newspaper to your door.
Again, old business, "but on the internet". And if we don't like paypal, we can always build something better, right?
There are more and more websites that try to force users to disable Adblock, but it only means that the anti-ad efforts are moving to anti-anti-adblockers.
For now the easiest way is to use Anti-Adblock Killer[1], which so far works really well. Most likely they will add support for Wired once they enable their anti-adblock policy.
"Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled content left, and I'll just figure something else out."
It reeks of desperation on their part - no good options left for their business or their business model.
That being said, while I will not miss wired.com at all, I will miss a site like arstechnica and would hate to think they are in the same boat ...
Presumably, given the even higher level of technical acumen among their readers, ars might be in an even worse situation.
I subscribed to their iPad magazine publication for the last several years in an effort to support them. That weighs in at USD$25/year off memory (NB: non-US subscribers get screwed for print delivery), which I felt was fair given I minimially read the magazine itself and just browse their site sometimes, e.g. when an article is linked from here or I see one on Twitter.
I would've hoped there would be some acknowledgement for their magazine subscribers, both digital and print. Certainly for print, which costs significantly more, but even for magazine subscribers who've been around for a number of years.
It's funny to see amongst all the stock market rout how companies that are (now) subservient to the markets have to react to a down market caused by other bullshit than journalism. The lesson here is Wired, stay true, don't fucking sell to Conde Nast and remain TRULY independent like real journalists should so you don't have to fucking suck dick for money when the big old bullshit tech bubble starts to burst.
The model I would like to see involves micro-payments. I would be willing to "tip" say $0.10 or $0.15 here and there to instantly unlock certain articles. I think if this were easy to do then wired and other websites like it would make a lot more money over all from it's content.
The problem though is that with today's credit card infrastructure the processing fees make this sort of thing unrealistic, and the emerging alternative (blockchain tech) is not yet widely enough accepted by consumers to be useful in this regard.
I think we'll get there eventually, and a new "culture of tipping" on the web may flourish in a way that is very healthy for the journalistic community as a whole. It could also mean that for instance a poor person in a remote part of the world could record a youtube video of some traditional folk art or dance and then upload it to multiple social platforms and receive material amounts of money from random visitors within the first few hours without first needing to "strike a deal with youtube" or anything like that.
This might reorient village life in some areas away from making trinkets to sell to western tourists and instead towards making traditional creative art to share with a global audience. This could in theory help counteract the "westernization effect" that global cultures have been experiencing.
It looks like a move in that direction for sure and I think that's great. I personally don't believe that blockchain is the "only way" to make this idea happen of course. I think that there is an opportunity now for companies to "preempt" the wide adoption of blockchain tech on the web by offering a service that provides the same flexibility as blockchain tipping, but with a more frictionless user experience. I personally believe the key to doing this effectively will be
1. support for micro transaction amounts (The PPC business already think in terms of clicks that are worth a few cents on the dollar, and I think ultimately the consumer will think like this as well). In other words I think tipping needs to feel non-material to the consumer, but a dollar.. that's almost enough to buy a domestic draft beer.
2. support for truly global payment (tipping) and global remittance with reliable, flexible, always on time payouts.
It would need to embrace blockchain as a payout method because this is the only way to offer truely global remittance capability right now. In other words there's no way to get around blockchain completely so it's better to support it.
One way this could work would be for the platform to issue it's own alt-coin which rides on the back of the platform's reputation. Bloggers in diverse foreign locales where it's difficult or time consuming to receive bank wires could exchange these alt-coins to whatever they need to arrive at local currency. The consumer in priveldged markets would be sheilded, so to speak from thinking in terms of blockchain units because the platform would make it easy for them to tip and be paid in dollar amounts using the standard payment methodologies such as bank wires, ACH, and debit/credit cards. This reduces the amount of friction experienced by the average consumer in the most developed markets while at the same time enabling participation by people in the under-developed markets. In this way the platform could be thought to support a form of "graceful degradation" from a frictionless mobile/web consumer experience at one end to the complexies of blockchain / currency exchange at the other end.
3. Privacy protection
4. Fairness. The fact that you have your brand reputation tied to the platform why it's worth hosting not because of direct revenue. In other words No Squeeze.
5. A no-hassle embeddable tipping badge that any webmaster can easily leverage
6. No demanding of identity documents or tax id numbers while witholding payout. It should be the responsibility of the webmaster who is being tipped to comply with his local laws and tax regulations.
I think that if the ball is dropped in any of these areas then some variation of blockchain will ultimately win.
I use Google Contributor [1], which _effectively_ functions as an ad blocker, one that compensates website owners for the ads they're not displaying.
A different, but equivalent, way of looking at the product is that Google Contributor lets me essentially enter a op ad in the advertising auction for any web page I visit; if my bid wins, I see a placeholder instead of the ad. One nice side effect of this scheme is that the ads that do make it through are generally of high quality, since they're the ones for which some advertiser managed to outbid me.
Me too. Unfortunately, it only is able to block DoubleClick ads, but I agree it makes the web a nicer place, across all devices, without having to deprive websites I go to of revenue.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadI do pay subscriptions for things that I use (almost) daily: Hulu no commercials version, Netflix, and Google Music.
So, good idea, but I would expect a subscription to perhaps cost $10 to $15/year. Just my opinion...
Don't get me wrong, texture is probably doing great things, but until we get copyright changed to include a right to stream any work (subject to payment), such collections will be mostly pointless.
If I knew how to do buffet-style scheme for this without involving things like carrier billing and DNS tracking, I'd be working on my own startup RFN. This could undo the likes of Google and FB and make the web a much better, and much more private place.
The $1/week is a ridiculous grab from people who are unaware that there is a cheaper option available.
Something squirrelly in the pricing tiers.
I'd consider a $1/week if it covered all Conde Nast publications, or a significant portion of the internet. By that logic, though, I'd prefer if a subscription to Texture (Next Issue) or other content services included free access to the affiliated websites without ads. It adds up quick, but even the weekly version works out to $3.46/week for basically every magazine I'd care to read...
Of course ... I'm just saying this. I actually don't read magazines. But I'd pay for a subscription, especially if I could share it with family.
Good luck with that, Wired.
The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation.
While you may think that you don't care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.
I don't see this ending well for any party involved.
Don't view ads. Wired doesn't care about you. You contribute nothing back anyway.
So by making it a little harder, at least some of those people with morals will be pushed in the right direction to pay or white list ads for free content.
As opposed to those without morals who won't white list the trackers or pay up?
As opposed to those moral upstanding citizens that run the advertising industry?
I don't think that the 'morals' bit needs to be in there, in fact it would be stronger without.
The response is, we'll weaponize and win.
Or excuses about how I don't contribute anything but might bring in someone who does, so how dare you. You are going to fail.
These are not evidence based arguments. It's not to hard to block Ad Block users.
Other media companies have survived with paywalls AND ads.
And even if it doesn't work out, Wired can pull back and at least say they tried.
It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral. The glee at that they might fail. This can be read both above and below the lines.
And honestly, if there really is a wall that isn't casually circumventable, then I just won't read it. I don't care enough to pay.
If they curated some constantly brilliant content, I'd jump on paying them. But as it is, I rarely end up there anyway.
You really got to realize this is not about showing ads, ie. some plain jpg/gifs--which a lot of people would accept--but loading tons of tracking scripts that slow you down and violate your privacy. So yeah, I'm gonna protect against that, I don't deem it as an acceptable choice.
They are asking to violate your privacy by feeding your personal information to an ad network. If they were clear about the exchange they expected (personal info for articles), then people wouldn't be so harsh on them. It's pretending that their proposition is just seeing a little ad that's misleading to the point of being immoral.
>It's the self righteous behaviour about it that's immoral
I wouldn't call people being upset that wired has made this anti-privacy decision to force people into an all or nothing subscription self-righteous because it's not unfounded. This is a big middle finger to anyone who cares about privacy.
It is shortsighted to value your readers only for their capacity to view and click advertisements.
Readers also act as distribution nodes, sharing content that they find compelling with others who may or may not use ad blockers.
Building walls will result in fewer readers, and as you've noted, less traffic will be bad in the long term...
As a publication they have little to offer to justify their high subscription cost and the portion of people interested in tech who don't use an ad blocker will eventually be the empty set.
Alternatively they could offer tasteful text and image ads served from their own domain and many people would be willing to allow them.
So tech is having a shake-out at the moment - many assumptions being questioned, many business models being challenged, many unicorns revealed as dead horses.
Considering how little of genuine value these businesses contribute - including Wired - I'm not sure they're going to be heavily mourned if they disappear.
Is anyone really going to mind much if the Distraction Economy dies over the next few years?
Nice.
You might take a moment to consider that some of us who block ads are more concerned about the morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than we are the revenue some arbitrary site may or may not lose from missing our impressions before you start casting stones wildly about like that.
I'd probably be very willing to consider whitelisting sites who worked with advertisers that didn't run tracking programs most of the Three Letter Agencies in the West would kill to access — if they didn't already have behind-the-scenes arrangements with them. But that question is probably pretty moot at this point, isn't it?
Regardless, calling it a "crusade" is the same kind of argument-poisoning that the GP uses with his "people with morals" quip. If you can't have a discussion without resorting to that kind of rhetoric — term used very damned loosely — then, personally, I don't think you've got much of a point.
Apparently using correct words is now argument poisoning charged rhetoric.
Okay.
Sorry if you don't like when the definitions of words match what you are doing.
"If you can't have a discussion without resorting to that kind of rhetoric — term used very damned loosely — then, personally, I don't think you've got much of a point."
Let's look at who is using rhetoric here: "morality (read: more or less utter lack thereof) of the a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶t̶i̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ trackers than "
Yeah, i guess i couldn't agree more with you.
Yes, if the content is good enough to warrant paying for a subscription.
> Or does that all conveniently fall by the wayside in your crusade?
Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade.
So if it's not, you just view it anyway?
"Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade. "
It's pretty rich to make a moral argument the way the parent did and have a problem with a term like crusade, which is a precise and correct term to describe this.
Yes, because I decide what authors and publications I choose to support based on what they publish. You might think I'm "taking free samples too far", but you can always flick through a magazine before buying it in a store -- what is the difference here? Paying for a publication when you have no idea what they produce is just being a bad consumer.
> > "Nope, and there's no reason to muddy the waters with terms like crusade. "
> It's pretty rich to make a moral argument the way the parent did and have a problem with a term like crusade, which is a precise and correct term to describe this.
Well, to be fair GP made a similar moral argument, so I guess they also have a crusade?
Losing 20% of their audience may have really painful effects on their reader network.
Edit: Make that $0.01 for the page.
When I read the price, I immediately wondered "what are they doing to my computer with those ads that they're making $52 a year when I read maybe four stories a year?"
Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices. One thing they're not taking into consideration is that you're a lot more likely to click on an article if it costs you nothing but time. For many readers, even $1 a year isn't a good value.
It's a dead-wood mindset, I think. Sure, I like to read a Wired article now and again. But I don't regularly hit their site. I go there based on search results, links, and so on. There are too many sites at that level for me to bother following. Let alone subscribing.
I get that $52 isn't very much. Not for me, that is. But it is for many readers. And so it's not a good choice for a basic subscription. If they don't want to bother with per page pricing, they could at least offer multiple subscription levels.
That might buy the publisher (a) some credibility, and (b) an incentive to publish decent quality articles and not clickbait headed by misleading summaries.
Might some people abuse it? Sure. Probably. But I think that a large majority would not. Most of us do get it that people need to get paid.
Weeeell, some people do exactly that (and have done since the beginning of time, as popularized in folk songs). The iOS AppStore does that, and that's also "pennies". Amazon does that. It's no small part of their success.
It's a question of self-belief. A seller who is confident about the quality of his delivery will not mind guaranteeing refunds, because chances are that very few people will take him up on it. Considering your costs are pretty much the same whether you serve 10,000 or 1,000 webpages, it doesn't really matter if you get 9,995 or 995 refunds.
I guess, it's a bad analogy, as food that makes you sick is easier to discern than "shoddy article with no journalistic integrity"
>I don't see this ending well for any party involved.
I would get used to this. Ad blockers are relatively easy to defeat and if that 20% figure starts getting higher we'll start to see more and more sites employ these countermeasures.
Blocking users that use ad blockers and will never visit their site may potentially block a significant chunk of their intended audience. That audience may then share interesting articles with others who are not running ad blockers. I would assume that the cost of serving a single article to a portion of users who will not view ads may be insignificant in comparison.
I can only see this as an act of desperation. They can't possibly think people are going to sign up for $1/mo subscriptions ... they must know that will happen fewer than 1000 times ever.
The other half - restricting their content from the exact audience that they supposedly represent ...
I feel sorry for them - they must be completely backed in a corner with no good options.
You can't trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.
There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.
Maybe now if they served a canvas element, and put all the content in that with animated ads, that would be more bothersome.
Yes, please! If they are going to serve every article as a single static file, then I might actually consider paying for it.
Here's the trivial client blocking method: OCR and break the result into different groups by page location, font size and color; the article will be the largest groups of text with the same font. Large images and charts that were part of the original article would be cropped out and re-inserted into the final document. Within a few days you would see a browser extension made with adaptable filtering for most sites that used the monolithic PNG.
That is, they can negotiate with you using your desire to access their servers as leverage.
You can refuse to negotiate, in which case they can take steps to block your access to their server. You can use technological means to get around that, but then they can adjust their own technology to block your new strategy.
And then you're in a war.
You said "there is no war", but obviously there is.
Your choices are:
* use the servers and look at ads * don't use the servers at all * use the servers and try to block ads
In this third option (which seems to be the one you chose), the people who own the servers can then try to block your access to the site. You can then try to circumvent that block, then they can try to block you again.
This is a war. You said "there is no war".
The subtext here is that, grand proclamations about sovereignty over your computing devices aside, by making other people's servers a crucial component of your computing you are ceding to them some leverage and therefore control.
There is no war, because I'm not going to fight. I'm going to viciously restrict what runs on my system to protect my own security and privacy. If that makes some services or sites become unavailable to me, so be it.
Isn't having an account a form of tracking?
And this is where wired missed the boat here, the article should not have been titled 'how wired will deal with ad blocking' but it should have been 'how wired will deal with tracking'.
well, i will restrict my viewing of WIRED.com then. Like completely.
If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't write the articles.
At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.
If there is any party that is aware of how many people on wired's web property are running an ad blocker it is the advertising networks.
Wired is not telling them that they get 'XXX'k traffic per time unit, they're being told what their traffic is and what percentage of them has an ad blocker installed.
The truth is, I can always just go outside. Go for a run, Go for a hike with my kids... collect some rocks, smash rocks looking for geodes, play catch, play hide and go-seek, cook, drink. All will be much better than me sitting on my computer reading articles on Wired.com
The people commenting here that Wired doesn't need to care about ad-blocking readers, are entirely ignoring this critical element. It's a big component of how new people get introduced to Wired.
One metric that is used to rank sites is the bounce rate. If ad blocking users simply go back to Google and look for another result, then they will get penalised by Google.
If you feel $1 per week ($50 / year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired's are worth CPM rates that you'd probably not believe.
Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it.
This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will survive the transition, at the same time they don't seem to understand that to lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience (that high?). After all, it wasn't the users that decided to substitute 'ads' with 'tracking', 'visual garbage' and 'malware' it was the properties and the advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.
But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made 'advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card' into their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.
Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your adblocker that you won't be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.
I've seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to never want to disable all my ad blockers, we'll see if there is a wired article that pushes me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the cut.
Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not rely on a centralized entity.
Micropayments, however, will never work. The main problem is that the jump from no payment to $1 is the biggest hurdle. If you can get someone to pay anything at all, you can probably get the to pay more than micropayment amounts, so your optimum payment is never a small one.
Wired figures that if you read any of their content at all you owe them $50 / year and that's an 'all you can eat' figure. So if you read all the articles they have that's a bargain, if you read only one then you might as well skip that one and the next and take your s.o. out for dinner.
A micropayment system would reduce the need for such calculations, it would allow a pay-as-you-go model which is far more effective for impulse buys such as articles.
Hell, putting a bitcoin address on my blog gave me actual couple of cents. :)
That you've given out a whole schmeckle in a year isn't much of a counterpoint.
It's like when someone would tip you $0.002 on Reddit back when people still used CoinTip: insult for the receiver while making the giver feel like they made a difference -- altogether a net negative for the world.
Why are you being so negative about donations? Some pick up, some don't. I don't see anything negative about even minimal donation. It means someone actually cared enough to do anything. I'd be happy to receive a $0.002 tip for some content I created - and not because it makes any difference to my account.
This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count free-to-play gaming where, for some reason, people refer to a $14 average purchase as a micropayment.)
If it were possible to lower the friction while maintaining security, that presumably would already be the case, as there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers.
At least up until now, there have been ad sales, which you can think of as an incredibly heath-robinson micropayment system: a small amount of what I pay for every product I buy goes to their marketing department, which passes on a smaller amount to advertising firms, which give it to websites. The viability of advertising largely removed the incentive to develop micropayment systems; hopefully that's now changing.
I'm already using Google Contributor, and have apparently effectively paid amounts from less than a cent to $0.35 to various sites I've visited in the last month or so, and all for $5 a month. Seems like a better way to handle paying for content than signing up for subscriptions individually with dozens of sites.
You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms, but for the small amounts you are mining that really doesn't matter. The benefit is having (a small amount of) money put onto your device without you having to make any effort at all and replenished over time. There will also be the ability to specify a threshold below which money can be transferred from your device to a website without your authorisation. So you might specify 1 cent a webpage (for a collection of high quality sites) that you're happy to pay without constantly having to press an “ok” button.
This will then deliver a very low effort system for micro-paying websites requiring very little need for attention and management from the user, effectively automatically paying websites with device-generated digital currency rather than with attention/exposure to ads.
[1] https://21.co/learn/21-micropayments/#how-21-micropayments-w...
Someone come up with a service where you push money to (so any security breach is limited to the $20 or whatever you keep there) and then have a browser plugin that reacts to a payment challenge (either HTTP 402 or some meta-tag) and presents me with a native chrome button that can't be spoofed by site JS. And add a whitelisting option for something like The Guardian where I currently pay a monthly fee.
You would not be mining on a computer's CPU (or GPU). You would be mining on a dedicated ASIC chip (that is already in production).
> And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery.
Which I why I specified in my comment that you could limit the mining chip to running only when the device is plugged into the wall (e.g. when you charge the battery overnight).
Here is the repo: https://github.com/KonstantinSchubert/bitcoupon-public/
Somehow I got bored with debugging all the different components, but I still think it has a lot of potential.
That's how I use my Paypal account. I top it up occasionally by transferring money from my real bank. Paypal has usually the equivalent of about USD100 and it does NOT have my credit card number.
I would be quite happy to use Paypal for micropayments but I haven't seen anything yet that works and asks for a small enough amount to qualify as micropayment.
1) The blockchain can handle approximately 3 transactions per second, which if actually spread evenly across the day (which they wouldn't be), it can handle around 260,000 transactions per day. A website like the New York Times does over 1MM unique per day.
2) In order to get settlements on your transactions, you have to pay a fee or else miners will ignore you. Current fees are around the equivalent of $0.04 USD. So your 1 cent transaction will not only bound up the network, but also cost you 5 cents to actually get processed.
Bitcoin is not now, nor will it ever be, a feasible solution for micropayments. And the ridiculous 21.co mining rig is even more ridiculous of a solution.
Heck, I get annoyed when on Snopes simply because I can't select any text (which I use to keep my place in the article).
The problem is that this 'solution' is not really a solution. It degrades the web to a fraction of its original use case and it would indicate a drastic departure from the open standards that got us here in the first place.
In a war - if you want to end it - the idea is to de-escalate. A reasonable first step from a property such as wired would be to demand from their ad-tech providers that they get rid of any tracking code and other trickery in their ad tags and that the ads served would be simple imagery rather than flash and/or javascript ads that leak an enormous pile of sensitive data about you to the 'supply side platforms'.
But since that would go hand-in-hand with a reduction in effectiveness they would then have to de-rate their ad prices or they would have to live with less income. It appears that wired would rather self destruct or at a minimum force users to convert directly at rate card prices (a win for them if they do in signfificant numbers) rather than go down this route. Time will tell if it is the winning move.
The client will always win. Browsers are user agents, not server agents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C-2dKe9NjI
There are scripts that foil ad block detection as well. So some people are fighting back.
It reminds me of file sharing sites like bittorrent sites that people use to get DRM free versions of products at risk of having their IP scanned by DMCA bots sending them a C&D letter.
It comes down to when you buy something you don't own it you only buy the right to use it. Now you only have the right to read articles if you get exposed to ads and tracking. If you block ads they can take away your right to read an article.
It is all about rights and how corporations control what you get access to.
Facebook, Google, and others use ads and tracking as well to earn money. Their sites are free at the cost of your privacy rights.
Look, it's easy to wave your hands and talk about viral articles, but fundamentally they will do what they need to in order to stay alive, or be replaced by a company that will. You can have micropayments (failed experiment), subscriptions, or ads. Empirically it seems like ads or other non-monetary consideration (influence, sponsored content, etc) has outcompeted subscription-based models for most content. Given that the "war" is entirely technical & visible to the end user only by the presence or absence of ads, the question is just whether you'll read a publication that has ads, or not. Empirically, the general population will.
(This says nothing about how invasive the ads are).
Ad-blockers will win because people find ads very annoying.
On the extreme side, I would say that I have won this bet already; if you pick up something like the Wall Street Journal and count the number of articles that someone involved wanted printed, you'd find that most of what you're reading is one kind of ad or another.
But there are technical solutions as well. Obfuscation beats machine parsers for at least the foreseeable future.
Correction: they make it up by giving third parties the ability to lift each and every bit of identifiable information available from your browser, to profile you, to sell your demographic information (lat/lon/approximate age/wealth/family situation/etc, etc) to middlemen who will then in turn sell the opportunity to advertise to you in a real time bidding process to the highest bidder, some ad agency that bought campaign inventory.
If it was just the ads I highly doubt there would be any issue at all.
When will these clueless execs realize that if they didn't abuse our eyeballs they'd have our eyeballs?
That's kind of the point, you know.
If I worked at WIRED I'd be very concerned with increasing the quality of content.
Sigh, again, these are just the incidentals of ads. I wish everyone was just completely honest about what ads are for: they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. Ads are not some goodwill clever mechanism to keep magazines in business. The purpose of ads is not to keep Wired in business.
That being said, I think Wired is completely in their right to escalate in the adblocking arms race. I just wish that they were honest about the rules of engagement: either you are open to the possibility of acquiring a purchasing need that you did not have until you watched an ad, or you do not read Wired's articles.
Or like Hobbes said to Calvin...
http://ignatz.brinkster.net/cimages/joyce.gif
I have to take issue with this, sorry. You may not be fully cognizant of your needs at the time you see an ad, and what if an ad tells you something about what you want rather than what you "need"? And who are you to make that call for anyone other than yourself?
Who are you to say what the grandparent is cognizant of or not?
I for one do definitely not need advertising to tell me what I need, if I need advertising to tell me then I did not need it.
> And who are you to make that call for anyone other than yourself?
The call was made on behalf of at least on other person, but in fact that suggestion was never made in the first place.
So, let's talk about the ultimate purpose of ads. Do we endorse that purpose or not? That's the conversation I really want to be having.
I think those ads definitely exist-- , but I think as well ads can just be a company with a thing, making sure you're aware of that thing.
I presume you enjoy at least some movies. I also presume you have missed movies that you would have enjoyed, because the trailer or whatever never made it to you. Getting that movie trailer or poster to you, and only getting those trailers or posters of movies that you'd like to you, is definitely advertising, but I don't think it's negative advertising.
* If Wired would implement a solution that provides confidentiality to users, following the approach of The Intercept [1], I would have no problem with it.
* If Wired would show me ads I was interested in, I'd be happy to see them (assuming my confidentiality is preserved).
* If Wired would provide a way to pay them without having to go through another website registration and credit card payment process, I'd pay them. I don't have time to register for and pay every website I read using the current systems, and Wired isn't at the top of my list.
If users are so annoyed by part of your website that they are investing time and effort in disabling it, perhaps the problem is with your website.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2015/11/04/what-the-intercepts-new-...
You are so terribly wrong about that.
The online version of the media kit for the wired property:
http://www.condenast.com/brands/wired/media-kit/web
No rates quoted but:
http://adage.com/article/media/digital-cracks-50-ad-revenue-...
Lists the ad revenues at 50% of the total (online + print), that was 2013.
Last year:
http://digiday.com/publishers/two-thirds-wireds-revenue-digi...
So you can see why they're panicking, adblockers are taking a significant bite out of their revenues.
And then there is the print side: (~115K for a full page ad in the print magazine).
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/2015_WIRED_M...
Is a good primer into how a print/online property such as wired profiles itself to advertisers.
Still trying to find an actual CPM / CPC rate for wired but no luck so far, but
http://monetizepros.com/display-advertising/average-cpm-rate...
Has premium display sitting at about $10 CPM and that's not a bad number compared to what I know about this field, the actual rate for a property such as wired would be a little higher than that (-15% agency fees), but not by much so that's a good starting point.
Here is how a terminal looked like :
https://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/show...
I'm not suggesting to go back to that of course, it was dreadful, but it feels like current content providers always try to reinvent the Minitel somehow.
Actually, Teletel/Minitel wasn't completely centralised. A lot of services ran from their own servers on an X.25 network....
The UK's inferior Prestel service was completely centralised (well, there was more than one server, but the servers were identical).
However....
> The phone company directly handled payment so there was no friction or paywall.
That idea certainly worked well at the time. Today, you might want to subscribe to a "content server" accessed via a VPN.
After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains and for types of requests/actions on domains, I still don't see any ads but I do see an ever-increasing list of third-party sites Wired is pulling requests from. Given a choice between throwing up my hands and saying "Fine, f*ckit, do whatever the hell you want" and whitelisting Wired's requests to all of (disqus, optimizely, amazon-adsystem, condenastdigital, demdex, typekit, adobetm, chartbeat, cloudfront, doubleclick, googleadservices, googlesyndication, googletagservices, mediavoice, mookie1, omtrdc, outbrain, parsely, scorecardresearch, yldbt and zqtk) plus whatever others would be pulled in were I actually to whitelist, I guess I'll have to do without Wired.
So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that's AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting its own (and yes, I realize it's part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more. My basic reaction to this is that even if I trust Wired and Conde Nast, I don't know that I trust all those other sites like "mookie1," "yldbt," "zqtk" and whatever other obscurely-named domains.
Frankly, were I to see "yldbt" or "zqtk" as a running process or folder name on a system I was working on, I'd immediately rename them and start virus and malware scans.
So I guess my reading of Wired online will suffer much the same fate as my reading of Wired on paper, because while I like seeing occasional items from Wired it's not a daily destination for me, and I'm certainly not coughing up $50+/year for it.
Run some apps with Little Snitch turned on and you see the same thing. Tons of outbound requests to domains that I have never heard of and have no idea what they want on my machine.
I just block everything with reckless abandon. I don't give a shit if my "experience" is degraded.
Frankly, with small kids in the house who I would like to protect to the extent I am able... I am considering installing Pi Hole and whatever else I can find in addition to the spartan whitelist I've set up for them to use via parental controls.
It's one of the first things I install on my Macs. Worth every penny.
Little Snitch is basically a user-friendly general-purpose application Firewall. When a connection hasn't been whitelisted before, it pop up a dialog box allowing you to accept/reject connection to a host/domain/port permanently/temporarily.
uMatrix does not protect you against 'malicious' connections initiated by non-browser applications. Little Snitch does not provide the fine-grained URI-level filtering that uBlock/uMatrix provide.
Edit: if you have a Mac, Little Snitch is well-worth the money. It is very polished, does the job, and the developers are not greedy (I think I purchased an update once after I started using it in 2007 or 2008).
Disclaimer: I made it.
I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you deviate from the norm. I didn't want to use Google DNS and instead opted for OpenDNS, plus I wanted my own directory structure, etc...
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.
It then installs an updater via cron to check for updated lists every week.
As to your experience with speed, I'm kind of surprised. The only time I noticed a speed difference is when I blackholed domains in the hosts file that didn't resolve to a valid web server (i.e. resolving to 127.0.0.1 without having a web server running), and that's the opposite of what you describe. The pi-hole script also installs lighttpd to serve up a placeholder page, and uses some tricks like mod_expire to improve performance.
Never mind even getting hacked. Ad providers routinely violate the trust of content providers by activating audio, throwing up full screen overlays and who knows what else. I'm not an expert but I'm given to understand that it's hard for content providers to quality control these sort of ads. The whole delivery system is gamed to a ridiculous degree.
Simple static ads would render most of these concerns unnecessary, but I doubt there's any incentive to go back to that kind of "outdated" advertising.
heck i block ads as a side effect of blocking things like Google analytics.
EDIT: rephrase
In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name it.
I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the current bubble so something more useful can replace it.
There is also common banner dimensions that get blocked, but it is easy to defeat by adding a pixel somewhere that fits into site design.
Problem with this approach is that you can't just slap some random ad network script there and be done with it, no targeted ads, tracking etc - basically everything people don't like and a reason to use ad blockers.
What I object to is the cesspool of unidentifiable tracking and god-knows-what-else crud.
Publishers want ads but don't want to actually do the job of selling them; ads used to be free money, and this is coming to an end.
Ads from their own domain would be a little harder to block, especially because blocking would have to be done on a page-by-page basis (or at least, website-by-website).
I see, of course, that I'm likely not representing the majority of adblock users.
The marketers buy the hype and want all of that. "If I take this pretty chart from here, and that table that from there, and these numbers from over here, I can make a really impressive report!"
And they want to make sure that they're collecting all the data they could possibly be collecting (because they never know when they might suddenly need the last 6 months data about something they never thought of), even though they don't know what queries they want to be able to make.
So they make the developers add all of them, end up with tons of data but very little information, and start talking about 'this big data thing' that could maybe give them answers even though they still don't know what questions they want to ask. And to use it, you just have to add this little snippet of javascript...
when a site gets hacked, you get malicious content regardless you block ads or not.
I want people to get paid--really I do--but I'm not stepping barefoot into a cesspool of web cruft to do it. Blockers are like putting boots on so you can wade through it safely. Clean up your mess and I don't mind going barefoot.
They sound as though they're trying to accommodate 'us', but the proof will be in what the 'ad-free' experience is really like. I wonder if they're considered a paid RSS feed as an alternative - that would certainly solve much of the issue for many.
Nit: Those aren't top-level domains. TLDs are things like com, net, org, uk, io, etc. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain
No thanks.
I use uBlock Origin. I went onto Wired to see how it worked. I must have viewed about 2 dozen articles, with no side effects. Either they haven't activated this yet, or it doesn't work.
BUT!
I want to KILL the free internet--that is, the internet that is paid for with slices of my attention and life. I do believe that advertisers are very good at extracting my attention and money, and I genuinely do want to destroy that internet model. What will emerge? I can only cross my fingers.
They want my money, they're going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop shop option.
No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a week subscriptions, logins, and such just to read articles linked to by Hacker News. Your content just isn't that important to me, sorry.
I like reading sites that don't require a login unless you want to leave a comment. My account was hacked at the Harvard Business Review and I used to leave comments there. They redid their website and limit what you can read now.
Sorry to say websites are moving towards a subscription model and I don't read every article on a website to make it worth the money. Just articles I have an interest in reading. I don't mind ads as long as they aren't annoying. As long as they don't take up a lot of the screen or pop up windows or a new browsing window or pop up a notice to enter my email to subscribe to their newsletter. I want to just read an article with no annoying stuff. Clickbait articles that take up several pages turn me off. Video ads that autoplay turn me off. That is why I installed an ad blocker to get rid of annoying things. I don't mind non annoying ads like Adwords or the typical banner ad.
So, you wouldn't need to share your payment details with any publisher, but with just one , that distributes it further. This is really similar with the system in place in some countries, when you wanted to get a subscription to a newspaper, a central collecting money company would take your request, invoice you, etc, and distributed the newspaper to your door.
Again, old business, "but on the internet". And if we don't like paypal, we can always build something better, right?
For now the easiest way is to use Anti-Adblock Killer[1], which so far works really well. Most likely they will add support for Wired once they enable their anti-adblock policy.
[1] https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
It reeks of desperation on their part - no good options left for their business or their business model.
That being said, while I will not miss wired.com at all, I will miss a site like arstechnica and would hate to think they are in the same boat ...
Presumably, given the even higher level of technical acumen among their readers, ars might be in an even worse situation.
I would've hoped there would be some acknowledgement for their magazine subscribers, both digital and print. Certainly for print, which costs significantly more, but even for magazine subscribers who've been around for a number of years.
The problem though is that with today's credit card infrastructure the processing fees make this sort of thing unrealistic, and the emerging alternative (blockchain tech) is not yet widely enough accepted by consumers to be useful in this regard.
I think we'll get there eventually, and a new "culture of tipping" on the web may flourish in a way that is very healthy for the journalistic community as a whole. It could also mean that for instance a poor person in a remote part of the world could record a youtube video of some traditional folk art or dance and then upload it to multiple social platforms and receive material amounts of money from random visitors within the first few hours without first needing to "strike a deal with youtube" or anything like that.
This might reorient village life in some areas away from making trinkets to sell to western tourists and instead towards making traditional creative art to share with a global audience. This could in theory help counteract the "westernization effect" that global cultures have been experiencing.
1. support for micro transaction amounts (The PPC business already think in terms of clicks that are worth a few cents on the dollar, and I think ultimately the consumer will think like this as well). In other words I think tipping needs to feel non-material to the consumer, but a dollar.. that's almost enough to buy a domestic draft beer.
2. support for truly global payment (tipping) and global remittance with reliable, flexible, always on time payouts.
It would need to embrace blockchain as a payout method because this is the only way to offer truely global remittance capability right now. In other words there's no way to get around blockchain completely so it's better to support it.
One way this could work would be for the platform to issue it's own alt-coin which rides on the back of the platform's reputation. Bloggers in diverse foreign locales where it's difficult or time consuming to receive bank wires could exchange these alt-coins to whatever they need to arrive at local currency. The consumer in priveldged markets would be sheilded, so to speak from thinking in terms of blockchain units because the platform would make it easy for them to tip and be paid in dollar amounts using the standard payment methodologies such as bank wires, ACH, and debit/credit cards. This reduces the amount of friction experienced by the average consumer in the most developed markets while at the same time enabling participation by people in the under-developed markets. In this way the platform could be thought to support a form of "graceful degradation" from a frictionless mobile/web consumer experience at one end to the complexies of blockchain / currency exchange at the other end.
3. Privacy protection
4. Fairness. The fact that you have your brand reputation tied to the platform why it's worth hosting not because of direct revenue. In other words No Squeeze.
5. A no-hassle embeddable tipping badge that any webmaster can easily leverage
6. No demanding of identity documents or tax id numbers while witholding payout. It should be the responsibility of the webmaster who is being tipped to comply with his local laws and tax regulations.
I think that if the ball is dropped in any of these areas then some variation of blockchain will ultimately win.
A different, but equivalent, way of looking at the product is that Google Contributor lets me essentially enter a op ad in the advertising auction for any web page I visit; if my bid wins, I see a placeholder instead of the ad. One nice side effect of this scheme is that the ads that do make it through are generally of high quality, since they're the ones for which some advertiser managed to outbid me.
[1] https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/