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Free news sites step up pleas for consumers to disable adblocking software:
If your web browser has recently updated, or you've loaded some new browser extensions, you may be seeing a message when you visit certain free content sites.If your web browser has recently updated, or you've loaded some new browser extensions, you may be seeing a message when you visit certain free content sites.
"Please support journalism by allowing ads," one of the pop-up messages reads.
In the message, there is a large link that will disable the adblocker extension in your browser. There is a smaller link that will allow you to proceed to the site while continuing to block ads.
Dominic Chorafakis, with the cybersecurity consulting firm Akouto, says adblocking extensions aren't exactly new, but it's possible browsers have strengthened them in recent updates.
"Sites that rely on ad revenue, of course, don't like this at all, and there is quite a bit of effort being put in from their side to detect when a visitor has adblocking in place and either ask them politely to disable adblocking or outright prevent them from viewing their content unless they disable it," Chorafakis told ConsumerAffairs.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 23 2020, @05:26AM (2 children)
Very few people objected to Google ads when they were plain text, relevant to search terms, and separate from search results . . .
Yep, those were definitely the good ol' days. A lot of people even liked those ads: they weren't in the way at all, and frequently they showed you stuff you actually wanted to buy! (what a concept!) Why on earth did they get rid of them anyway? How can having ads relevant to your search terms possibly be a bad thing business-wise?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 23 2020, @06:21AM (1 child)
They use the concept of wanting to track you across sites to customize ads for you specifically, as a cover to justify the tracking. The intelligence agencies want the tracking down to the individual, and they pay the search companies and the "ad" tracking companies well. The ads are just an excuse. (No, the intelligence agency probably isn't interested in you -- but if in the future they do become interested in you, they want to have that history of you, and everyone else, stored so they can go back and see what you were doing.)
But some websites that aren't in on the con actually try to run themselves based off money from the ads. It's not working very well for them because the money isn't in the ads anymore.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday December 25 2020, @05:49AM
This doesn't make sense. What "con" is there, for non-Google websites? Any non-Google websites involved here would have been using Google to *advertise*; they didn't get money from ads at all, they *paid* for those ads (using Google's "AdWords" service). The ads were a way to drive customer traffic to their sites, where they then sold stuff to them. Your whole post just sounds like a conspiracy theory; ads are a perfectly viable way of gaining customers, and in fact are generally the main way for companies to get new customers when they can't rely on word-of-mouth. Ad companies don't need government money to "spy" on people to make advertising a viable business; it's been viable ever since advertising was invented (which probably goes back to the Roman days).