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... 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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @10:07AM
They want clicks. I can make the adblocker click the ads for me on the background. Fine, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 18 2015, @12:35AM
But you'll still be connecting to dodgy ad networks, even if you don't see the ads. Not a great solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 21 2015, @07:32AM
The point is to fuck with metrics. These are meaningless clicks that bring no revenue yet chances are their stupid systems won't be able to tell the difference. That should give them the much wanted profit, right?
From the client's pov sluggishness doesn't really matter since you can indeed do all that crap on background, in parallel and without netiquette rules of max simultaneous connections per server or anything like that.