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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:15PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday September 17 2015, @01:15PM (#237423)

    Me too. DDG works fine most of the time for me as well.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17 2015, @02:04PM (#237450)

    I love Duck Duck Go with their bang commands. If I want a Google search of cute kittens because I don't like the results of DDG, I type in DDG "cute kittens !g" (no quotes). There is also youtube search (!yt), bing search (!b), amazon search (!a), google maps search (!gm), and pretty much anything you may want. Hell, there is even a kickass torrent search (!kat).

    No way I feel stuck with google for their search engine. But point taken for youtube though, all alternatives are bad. We need a DDG of tubes.