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Ad-blocking technology is finally taking off in the general population. In the US 15% of internet users have installed an ad-blocker, but among people born after 1980 the number is closer to 30%.
One American journalism startup thinks they have a business model that doesn't depend on advertising -- Low volume, high-quality, hyper-local investigative reporting intended to appeal to passionate citizens that are especially engaged in their community. Will it work? They claim to be close to achieving their budget targets after just a month of operation.
The startup is in Tulsa, about as far away as you can get from the stereotypical centers of innovation and journalism like Silicon Valley and New York City. Is the mainstream of internet development so addicted to advertising and Big Data profiling that they are unable to see opportunities that exist outside of their filter bubble?
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:15PM
I've heard from a couple friends with ties to Oklahoma that Tulsa is a shithole. What they're doing makes sense only because the people who care enough to know what's going on there will pay.
At least they, unlike the rag of another podunk shithole, [ivpressonline.com] can do without the ads. The IV Press is the official rag of my hometown and they will "allow" you to look at the ads (including very intrusive flash popups with audio) for free, but you will have to pay to read the content. It's an encrypted third-party thing, so there's no peeking with FireFox View Source and other Dev Tools.
That content is important to me since I'm no longer there. Before they had the paywall I was able to see that one of my childhood friends got busted at a meth party held at some flophouse, another was found dead in a canal under mysterious circumstances, the "Dear Abby" column about the politeness one of my friends' dogs shitting in all of his neighbors' yards, and the unfortunate death of my friend's sister before that friend had the chance to let me know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:58PM
LOL!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:10PM
Guess you will have to check out your old friends' Facebook pages and Twitter feeds now (ducking).
(Score: 2) by anubi on Monday June 01 2015, @10:33AM
Jiminy! I am running an older version of FireFox with NoScript.
I pulled the page down and it seemed to load OK and let me see a few stories. It did not seem to deny me anything.
But I did as you said and viewed page source.
Jiminy! Right at 9,000 lines of source code for one page of display! And that was just the JavaScript.
However, the healthcare pages I am supposed to use don't work at all, and it looks like if I cannot sign up personally somewhere and avoid the computer altogether, I simply won't be getting any. I will have to wait for Medicare to kick in, as I have about a year to go on that. Maybe I can play the "stupid computer-illiterate old geezer" and get someone else to do whatever it takes to communicate with the Federal systems. I felt I knew a lot about TCP/IP and the like, but trying to find the hangups during a connection to a federal website, even using Wireshark, is an exercise of finding the needle in the haystack futility.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]