Talk to me like I’m stupid, as I may be since Wired is no longer worth the price of admission for me and I can’t read the article here. But it sounds like you’re saying that without an ad-blocker, I see ads and get tracked. And with ad-blockers, in what you’re saying is the worst case scenario, I see fewer ads and cannot be conclusively said to be untracked. (And if I can navigate a less-than-perfect UI, then maybe there’s no problem at all.)
So… why exactly would I turn off my ad blockers?
Oh, I thought you were going to mention a movie theater.
I haven’t bought blurays or digital downloads; but if they’re like regular dvds, you can just ff by chapters to get through the trailers for other movies. Some people love trailers, which is why I don’t get too upset with the marketing. Once I’m no longer allowed to ff, then I’ll be sufficiently annoyed.
I personally hope the ad-sponsored Web will die in a fire.
Sure, a lot of people have been driving good sites and doing good things sponsored by ads, but the vast majority have more or less been tricked and cajoled to put Google ads on their sites in exchange for a trickle.
A lot of political sites are not ad-driven anyway, but thrive on voluntary work and donations/subscriptions. Wikipedia has no ads.
It’s time to move on from ad-financed publishing and onto the Next Thing. Incidentally, Facebook and Google are some of the players who will die if the ad-financed Web really does go away.
Ad-driven Web is a lot like ad-driven TV. With TV, we got to turn down the volume during the commercial breaks, and go to the potty as needed. With the Web, we have these adblockers. Both help ameliorate the problem of being yelled at to Buy Buy Buy.
I personally don’t use ads to sell my stuff. I find them annoying as hell. I know a few people who are in the ad business, and they are utterly baffled by my dislike of obnoxious ads.
And don’t even get me started on the folks in the publishing business who claim that I signed a contract with them to watch their ads in exchange for me enjoying the meager ‘content’ that they provide in between ads.
The ridiculous thing is that places like Wired want you to pay $1 a week…that’s insane. I bought a subscription to the print magazine years ago via one of the various magazine substitution sites for $4 for a year. Seriously, these prices are available for numerous magazines to this day, you just have to wait for sales or check on SlickDeals. I subscribed through 2020 for less than $30.
Full price via wired.com is still only $20/year, but they want $52/year for access to the website? Madness.
As for ad blocking and such, content providers need to up their game. I’m happy to see better targeted ads of things I actually might be interested in, but it’s not just a quid pro quo game of serving ads for content. You want my readership / viewership, that means vetted ads, no malware, NSFW filters, and bandwidth limiters (for video, sound, etc.).
I feel there’s a market for an advertising aggregate, where in exchange for some basic demographic info, a site gives you content access, and you only see the types of ads you want. Will everyone (viewers and companies) do it? Of course not, but a little common decency can go a long way.
Beschizza, get the morlocks onto creating blink tag ant banners stat, if you please. The internet clearly needs this.
Ok fine, AdBlock Plus are dodgy. Or they’re just trying to make a business since we, their customers, decline to pay for their services. Either way I’ll keep using them as long as Privacy Badger isn’t compatible with Firefox on Android.
Like 1/5th the ads I see reading news and such at work are blocked by the firewall as malware. So duh I use an adblocker on my personal machine. If simple ads are serving up malware that often fuck it I am not gonna browse the web without some precautions.
Fast forward is disabled during the stuff they want you to watch.
Gone are the days when you had a button that commanded the machine to fast forward. Now we have a button that meekly requests it.
I actually buy things from the bb store, so I know which moral high ground I put my soapbox on. Which ground is yours on, here in the free comments gallery?
Yeah, wired’s take bothers me. I have a few sites i have whitelisted for not using an adblocker, but wired’s approach actually pissed me off to the point of just turning off javascript for that page. Sure it means that most of the page doesn’t work correctly but at least i can read the entire article without succumbing to their annoying tactics 
I honestly think the 98% off vpn services are a Kaufman like art piece to see who can come up with the cleverest insult.
And yes, I am playing. Playing to win. Keep’em comin’ 
Same here. I mean, if BB wants to sell me ways to smoke weed, who am I to say “no” to that?
¡Viva la Revolución!
That’s nice. Did you read the part where Cory was the one arguing against bypassing ad blockers, while also doing same? It just seems hypocritical, is all I’m saying.
Some ad-blockers are smart enough to get around it. Wired is checking to see if their own ads can load. If the blocker filters all elements that have “ad-like” URLs, the Wired nag page will pop up. Other blockers like Ghostery only block 3rd-party elements, which doesn’t trigger the nag page because ads that actually come from wired.com will still load.
I stick with Ghostery (no analytics opt-in) on desktop browsers and Purify on iOS. They have their quirks but Ghostery is very tunable and Purify’s whitelisting works.
That’s when I started using Flash blockers. It worked wonderfully for a while, until it all turned into HTML5 videos. (For this reason alone, I morn the loss of Flash.) Static ads are fine with me, but auto-playing video ads and especially ads that reconfigure the layout of the page (e.g. ads that unfold over content when you accidentally mouse over them, or video ads that unfurl and then close) are incredibly annoying, sometimes to the point of making pages unreadable. Even muted those frustratingly common unfurling video ads cause the content of web pages to jump around, making it rather difficult to even read them.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/
It is supposed to work on HTML5 video, I can’t say I have noticed any over the last few years.
Um, they steal our mind-clicks. They don’t need to be paid for that too. And then the other guy, the propagandist. And then there’s the enforcers. They suck up literally tons of clicks…
Dood, humans see literally thousands of ads before they even think and spend clearly. Advertising doesn’t need support of any kind. You are tools of your commercial environment right now, tools.
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