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Google News Should Remove Paywall and forced adblock removers from feed

21 points by 77yy77yy ↗ HN
When I visit Google News and click a link I don't expect a paywall, I expect to read the news.

I also have never disabled an ad blocker because one site said I should in order to read their content. Another bad user experience.

I understand in both instances its their right to put a paywall or demand a removal of ad blocker but when aggregated by others, sites like Google News, the expectations of users are different and therefore, these sites should not be included and get traffic that for the most part, get nothing but a quick click to close window or a back button.

If the click doesn't match the user's expectation, you're doing it wrong.

22 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] thread
ocdtrekkie
Google has the opposite goal. Since their primary income is ad revenue, they have absolutely zero incentive to improve the experience for ad blockers. As long as your goal is to deny both paying for and seeing ads for content, don't expect anyone to make your life easier, because you're leeching off everyone else.
blowski
Agreed. I can see why they would demote sites with terrible advertising (especially if it generates them no revenue). But not why they would encourage adblocking in general.
johnnyfaehell
Sites with terrible advertising is literally the only reason I'm using an ad-blocker. If those sites had an ad free option for reasonably cheap I would just pay for those specific sites to be ad free.
ocdtrekkie
That may be the excuse you give, but be away that by supporting or using ad blockers, you're feeding a toxic force on the Internet, and drastically hurting good journalism.

Check out Troy Hunt's experience, with his ridiculously unobjectionable sponsor scheme, and the fact that ad blockers have gone out of their way to explicitly block it anyways: https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...

Even if you believe you only use the ad blocker because of terrible advertisers, you're likely harming legitimate ones as much or more.

patates
Just tell me in your web site kindly and unobtrusively that you need ads to survive and that you'd hand-picked ads which are not animated and respect privacy of your visitors. You'll immediately get an exception.
ocdtrekkie
Websites need ads (or subs) to survive. The default setting you operate on should not be to starve them, and you should not need them to tell you that before you act. If you were not blocking by default, and only blocked when a site was particularly invasive, your position would be far more defensible.
patates
If showing flashing ads wouldn't have been causing me seizures and if that it weren't the norm to show that kind of ads, what you said could work.

Also why am I paying for something without seeing what it is?

"Here's our content, maybe help us keep producing it by showing our promisedly sane ads?"

I buy a subscription or show ads to 90% of the web sites I visit more than a couple of times per month, as long as they offer them.

jerf
Does Google advertising offer paywalls and forced adblocking services? Or does the presence of a paywall and forced adblocking tend to imply the use of something other than Google ads? (Honest questions; I have never used any advertising and have no idea what they currently offer.)

Depending on the answer to those questions, it may be the case that knocking those sites out of the feed would statistically drive revenue to sites more likely to use Google's ads, in a way that would give them total plausible (if not simply "true") deniability.

ocdtrekkie
Sites use a pretty complicated pile of ad networks sometimes to try and get the best bang for their buck. You may not always see the same ad network ad in the same box. And something that detects adblockers could run with any of the above.
ungzd
The same with Hacker News.
DanielBMarkham
Let's not forget that Ad networks are terrible for carrying malware.

It's not going to happen, but it should.

AWildDHHAppears
I pay for NY Times and WSJ. If more people did that, we'd have less malicious "fake news."
jasonkostempski
If more people stopped blindly believing everything they read, there would be no such thing as malicious fake news, it would just be called "inaccurate information".
fao_
I usually block the anti-adblocker message. Works like a charm.
saycheese
Beyond me how people expect journalist to work for free, then complain about how hard it is to find good journalist.

Better idea would be for Google News to offer a unified subscription service, or simply license the content and have a unified interface.

jasonkostempski
We don't need journalist anymore just people that can write semi-coherently about interesting thing they actually know something about (not just any random thing they think people will click on). Instead of doing it for money, they can do it for the sake of communicating with other people about something they're involved with.
xcavier
We don't need employees any more. We just need semi competent people who half understand something. Instead of working for money, 'employees' can do it for the sake of contributing.
elorant
That's not that easy to do. GoogleBot would have to look at the code and decide whether it contains ad blocking checks. There's not a universal method to check for this so it would require a lot of customization and testing. I'm sure they have better things to do with their time.

Besides, I seriously doubt whether Google would oppose checks for ad blocking technology. After-all they make 90% of their income from ads.

Bedon292
Not sure there is a good way to make this happen. They are an aggregator, and have 10 different sources you can click on for the same topic. The 'top' article for that topic regularly rotates through sources throughout the day. I assume to promote some sort of fairness, or maybe it has something to do with recency of the last update. Not sure how it works. But how do they prioritize a site over another because of a pay wall? What about all the other people who actually pay for a subscription to some news sites? Should those sites really be punished? Should those users not see the results from that site?

If you don't like a site, you can hit personalize and reduce those sites from showing up. If I hit one that is telling me I have to remove an ad blocker, thats what I would do.

teaneedz
I don't use GN, but I agree with this from a UX side.
jasonkostempski
I wouldn't expect Google to do this, they live on ad revenue. I'd like to see someone else do it though, with much stricter rules e.g. no javascript and no embedded media. And I'd like some idealistic people to write interesting content for it to get it off the ground until it becomes insanely popular and everyone starts writing things in that format so "[Cool Name] News" will pick it. And then the Internet becomes a good place to visit again. [end day dream]