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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: 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).