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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 17 2015, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-way,-jose dept.

... or so some web pages are now saying according to an article published by El Reg:

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post has become the largest newspaper to refuse to serve readers who filter out advertisments.

The Post described it as "a short test" to gauge what users who use blocked blockers will do next. "Often, we run tests like this not in reaction to a problem, but to learn," said the paper in a statement.

Last week, Google also began to nuke the filters used to block preroll ads on its YouTube service. For extra punishment, YouTube viewers using AdBlock Plus had to sit through the full ad, by disabling the 'Skip Ad' button.

Around one in seven surfers use ad-blocking software, although the proportion rises when the demographic mix skews towards middle class and wealthy, and young and male, according to the latest annual PageFair report... into ad filters.

There is a reason why people use ad blockers. Sometimes it's for purposes of sanity, to avoid the very annoying auto-playing ads that more and more web sites now host. Others block them for security purposes, limiting one's exposure to the nastiness that can sometimes come from unscrupulous advertisers. Still others block them to reduce the draw on their precious bandwidth, especially those who get throttled if they use their monthly limit. Perhaps the Washington Post should be more careful with who they sell advertising to and more strictly limit the format of the adverts their sponsors pay them to publish instead of punishing those who block all of them.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @09:07AM (#237364)

    if I can't read your site, I guess I will not read your site.

    This. I expect most people who get this message will simply leave. The majority of content on the web is not worth turning adblockers off for.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @02:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @02:10AM (#237773)

    If your page can't be read using Lynx, the screenreader of a blind person will not be able to use the page.
    You are therefore in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    When I post a link, I assume the reader is blind and I check out this stuff--even finding the accessibility feature that indexes the page down past any crap to where the content starts.
    If your page is simply a link within another page and fails on backwards-compatibility, I will note that--or even find a replacement link that doesn't suck.
    If your page has the main relevant content and sucks, I'll just find a page that doesn't suck.

    .
    In addition, Google uses TEXT to deliver its ads--and always has.
    Those are embedded in the page text and the code is obfuscated.
    (I've tried to use the ##tag-here feature of my adblocker to hide (not block) that stuff and I couldn't do it.)

    If you did ads the way Google has done from the start (and don't eat up folks' bandwidth and RAM with your non-text crap), you'd get a lot less grief from users.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Friday September 18 2015, @05:23AM

      by anubi (2828) on Friday September 18 2015, @05:23AM (#237832) Journal

      I'll comment on Google's text ads....

      I feel that is one of the things Google's done right. The ones I have been presented are usually quite in line with what I am looking for.... and they are actually welcome.

      Where I think Google is messing up is irritating people with YouTube ads. I will go for the "opt out" ad where five seconds of it are mandatory, but it allows you to bypass if you want, but forcing me to wait through a minute of something that is absolutely no interest to me is pointless and irritating. So far, I have about a 1 to 10 ratio of abortable ads that I actually watch, but of that one, it was one I wanted to see, not one I was coerced and angered to the point I abort the whole attempt.

      Like a lot of other people here have already noted, the internet is not a very clean place. I do not like visiting any site with scripting enabled, just as I do not eat everything handed to me. Even in a business. I feel if they demand I eat it, I also reserve the right to sue the hell out of them if I get sick. However, the law sees things differently. A restaurant owner leaving a trail of e-coli infections in his wake is responsible for the grief, but a sloppy business webmaster leaking malware gets to hide behind a "hold harmless" clause.

      If I stopped by a restaurant and the first thing I get is a well-dressed mater-D bringing me a note in a silver dish telling me that by eating there, I agree to hold the restaurant harmless against food poisoning, would I eat there? We sure seem to think differently about what is given to our machines don't we? As far as I am concerned, javascript is the computational equivalent of the soiled menstrual cloth referred to in the Bible, and I really do not want my machine executing code snippets pushed to me over the net.

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]