
How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking - rschroed
http://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocking/
======
fencepost
I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if
everything it loads _today_ is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded
after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some
allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including
whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering.

After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains and for
types of requests/actions on domains, I still don't see any ads but I do see
an ever-increasing list of third-party sites Wired is pulling requests from.
Given a choice between throwing up my hands and saying "Fine, f*ckit, do
whatever the hell you want" and whitelisting Wired's requests to all of
(disqus, optimizely, amazon-adsystem, condenastdigital, demdex, typekit,
adobetm, chartbeat, cloudfront, doubleclick, googleadservices,
googlesyndication, googletagservices, mediavoice, mookie1, omtrdc, outbrain,
parsely, scorecardresearch, yldbt and zqtk) plus whatever others would be
pulled in were I actually to whitelist, I guess I'll have to do without Wired.

So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that's
AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting
its own (and yes, I realize it's part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level
domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more. My basic
reaction to this is that even if I trust Wired and Conde Nast, I don't know
that I trust all those other sites like "mookie1," "yldbt," "zqtk" and
whatever other obscurely-named domains.

Frankly, were I to see "yldbt" or "zqtk" as a running process or folder name
on a system I was working on, I'd immediately rename them and start virus and
malware scans.

So I guess my reading of Wired online will suffer much the same fate as my
reading of Wired on paper, because while I like seeing occasional items from
Wired it's not a daily destination for me, and I'm certainly not coughing up
$50+/year for it.

~~~
thirdsun
Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point
here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about
ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a
whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase
page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection)
or privacy concerns.

Simple static ads would render most of these concerns unnecessary, but I doubt
there's any incentive to go back to that kind of "outdated" advertising.

~~~
chrischen
But most people who block ads just don't want to see ads. Your technical
concerns are in the minority.

~~~
thirdsun
I think they just don't want to see ads as intrusive as the ones found these
days. Neither do I. While my main concerns are performance, bandwidth,
security and privacy, I don't think that simple static image ads would have
led to the widespread adoption of ad blockers we're currently seeing.

In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately -
video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name
it.

~~~
Freak_NL
Absolutely. The number of people who would still resort to blocking ads if
they were non-targeted, static, tastefully done yet clearly recognizable as
advertisements, served locally, non-tracking, and non-obtrusive would probably
have been negligible. But now there is an entire economy that depends on
advertisements that track you and know you and need to be served via third
party brokers, because if they didn't they wouldn't sell.

I don't know the solution to fix this mess, but I will gladly help pop the
current bubble so something more useful can replace it.

------
isomorphic
> So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if
> you are using an ad blocker.

Good luck with that, Wired.

The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never
visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking
escalation.

While you may think that you don't care about the people-who-will-never-pay
group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing
the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.

I don't see this ending well for any party involved.

~~~
elorant
$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good.
OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love
Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too
irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a
summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more
reasonable than asking me to pay for everything.

~~~
mirimir
Right. I don't read $1 worth of Wired per week. That page I just read was
worth maybe $0.001 (and that's being generous). Generally, I'd be happy to
match forgone ad income. I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to
earn $1.

Edit: Make that $0.01 for the page.

~~~
bachmeier
> I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.

When I read the price, I immediately wondered "what are they doing to my
computer with those ads that they're making $52 a year when I read maybe four
stories a year?"

Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set
prices. One thing they're not taking into consideration is that you're a lot
more likely to click on an article if it costs you nothing but time. For many
readers, even $1 a year isn't a good value.

~~~
mirimir
> Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set
> prices.

It's a dead-wood mindset, I think. Sure, I like to read a Wired article now
and again. But I don't regularly hit their site. I go there based on search
results, links, and so on. There are too many sites at that level for me to
bother following. Let alone subscribing.

I get that $52 isn't very much. Not for me, that is. But it is for many
readers. And so it's not a good choice for a basic subscription. If they don't
want to bother with per page pricing, they could at least offer multiple
subscription levels.

------
ljoshua
As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this/Forbes
approach/elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start
managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets.

I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my
monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to
make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you
get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a _physical object_ (battery) for $5
that comparing it to $4/mo for digital only feels cheap.

I don't mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I
don't want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.

 _Suggested Solution:_

Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I
funded one general "content publishers" account with the equivalent of that
$3.99/mo? When I get to a paywalled/ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose
to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I
would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing
to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.

Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they're already in the
process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the
failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can
someone go and build a great business out of this for me?

~~~
dexterdog
Why wouldn't you make it invisible? Do people really want to decide to pay or
not pay for each page hit? You have a monthly fund which is your subscription.
When you hit a site that is in the network it gets a chit against your
account. At the end of the month (or whatever) your chits are counted up and
providers get credited. It's really pretty simple and invisible. People get to
fund what they actually use. Content creators get paid. Content providers can
decide whether to paywall for out-of-network requests if they like. There is a
paper trail to deal with copyright violations. I just need a huge pile of
money to get people to sell it to some key players.

~~~
kfk
Do you? You can start with small blogs and take it from there. You can sell
subscriptions to different segments (tech, gardening, etc.) so that the % that
goes to a small player once things get bigger is meaningful.

~~~
dexterdog
There is also the 'pyramid' effect you can get by owning signups. If I as a
content provider or just a referrer send you in as a paying customer I can get
a cut of your monthly without even serving you content.

~~~
kfk
And there is also well done advertising. Once you have a big group of people
that reads articles on specific topics, I bet companies will want to pay a lot
to send them (top quality of course) content that is also promotional in some
way.

------
jacquesm
Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess.

If you feel $1 per week ($50 / year) is too much remember that display ads to
a targeted audience such as Wired's are worth CPM rates that you'd probably
not believe.

Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and
quite a bit of it.

This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is
definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will
survive the transition, at the same time they don't seem to understand that to
lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience
(that high?). After all, it wasn't the users that decided to substitute 'ads'
with 'tracking', 'visual garbage' and 'malware' it was the properties and the
advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much
to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.

But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made
'advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card' into
their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.

Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial
web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your
adblocker that you won't be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers
or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.

I've seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to _never_ want to
disable all my ad blockers, we'll see if there is a wired article that pushes
me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the
cut.

Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not
rely on a centralized entity.

~~~
mattmaroon
$1 per week doesn't seem like a lot when phrased that way. But when you think
about all of the sites your adblocker blocks ads from on a daily basis, if
it'd add up a lot of they all charged $1. I'd be ok with not consuming a good
bit of content and paying for the small few I like, but I'm not sure that's
sustainable. It'll be interesting to watch.

Micropayments, however, will never work. The main problem is that the jump
from no payment to $1 is the biggest hurdle. If you can get someone to pay
anything at all, you can probably get the to pay more than micropayment
amounts, so your optimum payment is never a small one.

~~~
jacquesm
Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe
even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else
besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the
'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means
that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that
you'll have to take that scenario into account.

Wired figures that if you read any of their content at all you owe them $50 /
year and that's an 'all you can eat' figure. So if you read all the articles
they have that's a bargain, if you read only one then you might as well skip
that one and the next and take your s.o. out for dinner.

A micropayment system would reduce the need for such calculations, it would
allow a pay-as-you-go model which is far more effective for impulse buys such
as articles.

~~~
Animats
All the enthusiasm for micropayments is from people who want to _collect_
micropayments. There is little or no consumer demand for the ability to _pay_
them.

~~~
viraptor
You'd think so... I signed up for flattr
([https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)) with some credit shortly after
they launched. Over half a year, I found one website
([https://lightspark.github.io/](https://lightspark.github.io/)) I went to
which wanted to receive my money (and they did). Everybody else served ads
(which I blocked).

Hell, putting a bitcoin address on my blog gave me actual couple of cents. :)

~~~
danneu
Clicking on a Gittip/Flattr/Patreon badge or looking up a donation Bitcoin
address are always worth a sad chuckle.

That you've given out a whole schmeckle in a year isn't much of a
counterpoint.

It's like when someone would tip you $0.002 on Reddit back when people still
used CoinTip: insult for the receiver while making the giver feel like they
made a difference -- altogether a net negative for the world.

~~~
viraptor
I wouldn't judge B addresses by looking them up. I cycle mine once in a while,
I'm pretty sure others do too.

Why are you being so negative about donations? Some pick up, some don't. I
don't see anything negative about even minimal donation. It means someone
actually cared enough to do anything. I'd be happy to receive a $0.002 tip for
some content I created - and not because it makes any difference to my
account.

------
vinceguidry
Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don't care. Just
won't read their content. Eventually there won't be any good non-paywalled
content left, and I'll just figure something else out.

They want my money, they're going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock
Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop
shop option.

No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a week subscriptions, logins, and
such just to read articles linked to by Hacker News. Your content just isn't
that important to me, sorry.

~~~
orionblastar
Not only that but every site that has your payment information could be hacked
and someone steals it along with your password, email, and other information.

I like reading sites that don't require a login unless you want to leave a
comment. My account was hacked at the Harvard Business Review and I used to
leave comments there. They redid their website and limit what you can read
now.

Sorry to say websites are moving towards a subscription model and I don't read
every article on a website to make it worth the money. Just articles I have an
interest in reading. I don't mind ads as long as they aren't annoying. As long
as they don't take up a lot of the screen or pop up windows or a new browsing
window or pop up a notice to enter my email to subscribe to their newsletter.
I want to just read an article with no annoying stuff. Clickbait articles that
take up several pages turn me off. Video ads that autoplay turn me off. That
is why I installed an ad blocker to get rid of annoying things. I don't mind
non annoying ads like Adwords or the typical banner ad.

~~~
ccozan
I wonder if this would be the case for Paypal Subscriptions. I am already
using that for a couple of sites, albeit they are with video content. Each is
a couple of Euros a month.

So, you wouldn't need to share your payment details with any publisher, but
with just one , that distributes it further. This is really similar with the
system in place in some countries, when you wanted to get a subscription to a
newspaper, a central collecting money company would take your request, invoice
you, etc, and distributed the newspaper to your door.

Again, old business, "but on the internet". And if we don't like paypal, we
can always build something better, right?

------
jordigh
> We know that there are many reasons for running an ad blocker, from simply
> wanting a faster, cleaner browsing experience to concerns about security and
> tracking software

Sigh, again, these are just the incidentals of ads. I wish everyone was just
completely honest about what ads are for: they are ploys to manipulate viewers
into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. Ads are
not some goodwill clever mechanism to keep magazines in business. The purpose
of ads is not to keep Wired in business.

That being said, I think Wired is completely in their right to escalate in the
adblocking arms race. I just wish that they were honest about the rules of
engagement: either you are open to the possibility of acquiring a purchasing
need that you did not have until you watched an ad, or you do not read Wired's
articles.

Or like Hobbes said to Calvin...

[http://ignatz.brinkster.net/cimages/joyce.gif](http://ignatz.brinkster.net/cimages/joyce.gif)

~~~
chrismcb
For wired the point is the ad is for them to stay in business. For the company
advertising the point of the ad is to sell something. Maybe it is something
you want, maybe it is something you don't need,maybe it is showing you need.
But this isn't a conspiracy for wired to sell you something you don't need.

~~~
jordigh
It's not a conspiracy, but it's so annoying that nobody speaks about the
ultimate purpose of ads. Their ultimate purpose is not Wired. Keeping Wired in
business is just one more incidental. If our purpose is to keep Wired in
business, there are other ways besides ads.

So, let's talk about the ultimate purpose of ads. Do we endorse that purpose
or not? That's the conversation I really want to be having.

------
Falkon1313
>We want to offer you a way to support us while also addressing those concerns

Then actually address those concerns, rather than just telling us to ignore
them (whitelist) or pay up.

I don't care about ads, really. Yes they are a petty annoyance, but I grew up
with magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio all supported by ads. However, the
way they presented their ads was markedly different.

* Their ads didn't invite dozens of third parties to spy on everything I do.

* Their ads didn't break into my home, rifle through my things, and set up operations doing potentially illegal activities in my basement.

* When I wanted to read a 1-page article in their magazine, yes they showed me some ads, but I didn't have to pay the full cost of having a 20-volume encyclopedia delivered to my house just for the ads on that page.

Find a way to advertise without constantly assaulting the reader. Actually
address your readers' concerns instead of downplaying them and knowingly
causing harm to your readers. You have other options. Taking them, and proving
that you can be successful without being evil, that would make a difference.

------
tokenadult
_Forbes_ has been doing this for a while on its website. (Or, at least for a
while it has been detecting the ad blocking-software that I have been using
for much longer.) I have basically stopped reading _Forbes_ (which maybe was a
good idea on other grounds) and have learned to appreciate stories from
competing publications. If _Wired_ doesn't want my eyeballs to visit its site,
I'll just stop bringing them there.

~~~
alienasa
Wired is in the business of making money. You don't pay them any money
directly, so they make it up by showing you ads. If you're going them to
prevent them from making money that way, then they don't give a hoot about
your eyeballs.

~~~
jacquesm
> so they make it up by showing you ads.

Correction: they make it up by giving third parties the ability to lift each
and every bit of identifiable information available from your browser, to
profile you, to sell your demographic information (lat/lon/approximate
age/wealth/family situation/etc, etc) to middlemen who will then in turn sell
the opportunity to advertise to you in a real time bidding process to the
highest bidder, some ad agency that bought campaign inventory.

If it was just the ads I highly doubt there would be any issue at all.

~~~
ariwilson
_Wired_ doesn't know any of that stuff about you. Facebook and Google might
which is why they have strong privacy policies and opt out procedures.

~~~
CaptSpify
Wired may or may not, I don't know. But they _are_ the facilitator for this
info. Also, Facebook and Google may have "opt out" procedures, but they've
been... less than trustworthy with those in the past, and I simply don't trust
them.

------
quotemstr
I use Google Contributor [1], which _effectively_ functions as an ad blocker,
one that compensates website owners for the ads they're not displaying.

A different, but equivalent, way of looking at the product is that Google
Contributor lets me essentially enter a op ad in the advertising auction for
any web page I visit; if my bid wins, I see a placeholder instead of the ad.
One nice side effect of this scheme is that the ads that do make it through
are generally of high quality, since they're the ones for which some
advertiser managed to outbid me.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/)

~~~
ec109685
Me too. Unfortunately, it only is able to block DoubleClick ads, but I agree
it makes the web a nicer place, across all devices, without having to deprive
websites I go to of revenue.

------
elorant
If I was dying to read a Wired article I could just google it. I'm sure
there'll be a cached copy somewhere. If that were to fail then I'd just drive
a headless browser to the url, or even a bot, and pull the content out.
Thankfully, I'm not that desperate to do either. Wired doesn't have as much
leverage as they think they do. And frankly, for a technology flagship as they
used to be, I'd expect them to work with the community, not against it. Find a
bulletproof way to serve malware-free ads and serve them from your domain and
I'd gladly whitelist your site. Otherwise I'm not risking it.

------
outside1234
> we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad
> blocker

well, i will restrict my viewing of WIRED.com then. Like completely.

~~~
paradox95
Since they aren't making any money from your visits to their site anyways I
doubt they will be losing a lot of sleep.

~~~
monkmartinez
That is quite the paradox, isn't it...

If they lose significant eyeballs, they can't charge a premium for the ad
space. With less premium, they make less money. With less money, they can't
write the articles.

At least with ad block and non-adblock eyeballs, they could say we get "XXX"k
traffic per day/month/year. Less traffic overall will be bad in the long run.

~~~
jacquesm
I hope you did not think that the advertisers aren't capable of running a
little estimation program on all those clicks going 'in' to wired that did not
result in the displaying of an ad tag?

If there is any party that is aware of how many people on wired's web property
are running an ad blocker it is the advertising networks.

Wired is not telling them that they get 'XXX'k traffic per time unit, they're
being told what their traffic is and what percentage of them has an ad blocker
installed.

~~~
monkmartinez
I hope the advertisers realize that we have not even come close to hitting a
critical mass of people that install adblockers in the first place. I am
amazed by how many people _don 't_ run adblockers. I tell everyone I know to
run them... Remember it is only 1 out of 5 right now... It will be much higher
as the tech illiterate are taught how to install them.

The truth is, I can always just go outside. Go for a run, Go for a hike with
my kids... collect some rocks, smash rocks looking for geodes, play catch,
play hide and go-seek, cook, drink. All will be much better than me sitting on
my computer reading articles on Wired.com

------
klunger
I actually think this is a reasonable move for them. They have to pay their
staff and keep the lights on while producing their content. It is kind of
entitled and ridiculous for readers to think the party of well-researched,
well-written and insightful content for free could go on forever. You either
should have to pay for it explicitly with a subscription fee, or consent to
ads and tracking. Yes, there is a lot of mediocre fluff/stuff there, but there
is easily $1/week worth of high quality content imho.

And, if you do not want to partake, then don't. No one is making you read
Wired. But, I strongly suspect that publishers that want to keep producing
high quality content without running themselves into the ground, as ad
blockers become more prevalent, are going to go down this road. The folks here
that saying "Ad blockers or bust!" are going to be left with increasingly
fringe and lower quality content in the future.

~~~
GVIrish
I don't think most people have a problem with the concept of ads, after all,
every print magazine is filled with them.

The problem is that ads on the web have become more and more obnoxious as
click through rates have fallen. The ads have dramatically reduced the
usability of some sites, and that's before you get into the issue of tracking
and malware.

Had Wired curated their ads to ensure that no full screen popups and other
annoying dreck never got onto their site, they might not have a problem. But
even then, so many other sites are filled with terrible ads that users would
keep using ad blockers anyway.

Maybe their plan will work, maybe it won't. Seems to me that they're going to
have to be a little more clever about this than just charging people $52 a
year for Wired.com. Maybe they're counting on a very small percentage of
"whales" to make it worthwhile but I think the vast majority of people using
ad blockers doesn't get enough value out of Wired.com to subscribe, especially
considering that it is 2 to 5 times as expensive as the print/tablet
subscription.

~~~
exodust
> _" the vast majority of people using ad blockers doesn't get enough value
> out of Wired.com to subscribe"_

Agreed. Subscribing isn't an option for casual readers of any online
publication. Nobody is spending hours on Wired every week! Whitelisting Wired
isn't a great option either, so there's not really a good solution yet.

------
hackuser
I don't mind ads but I do mind tracking.

* If Wired would implement a solution that provides confidentiality to users, following the approach of The Intercept [1], I would have no problem with it.

* If Wired would show me ads I was interested in, I'd be happy to see them (assuming my confidentiality is preserved).

* If Wired would provide a way to pay them without having to go through another website registration and credit card payment process, I'd pay them. I don't have time to register for and pay every website I read using the current systems, and Wired isn't at the top of my list.

If users are so annoyed by part of your website that they are investing time
and effort in disabling it, perhaps the problem is with your website.

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2015/11/04/what-the-intercepts-
new-...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/04/what-the-intercepts-new-audience-
measurement-system-means-for-reader-privacy/)

~~~
jacquesm
This is exactly the crux of the argument and wired _totally_ blew it by not
addressing this in a more direct manner.

------
jmsmistral
You can innovate around the issue, like some of the comments mention.

You should focus on growing sustainably, instead of selling yourselves to
advertisers for quick cash. God knows there are a plethora of other places we
can get our content from. There's enough information pollution in our daily
lives - I won't accept you polluting my reading of your 'well-written'
articles.

So, in summary... good riddance.

~~~
eitally
Agreed. I was recently miffed when they switched their RSS feed to only
include a snippet instead of actual content. I was also recently miffed when
Forbes started blocking ad blockers.

I have subscribed to the Wired print magazine off & on over the past decade
and never paid more than $10/yr for it. I am not currently subscribing, but if
presumably they'll put their best content in print, too, why in the world
would anyone pay 5x the print cost for online access?

~~~
jmsmistral
Completely agree on the subscription.

------
mark_l_watson
I like the idea of paying for subscriptions for no-ad service. However, the
$1/week seems a little high. I might read 10 to 20 articles a year on
wired.com.

I do pay subscriptions for things that I use (almost) daily: Hulu no
commercials version, Netflix, and Google Music.

So, good idea, but I would expect a subscription to perhaps cost $10 to
$15/year. Just my opinion...

~~~
runako
Wired kind of agrees: if you subscribe to the print edition (~12/yr IIRC), you
get access to the digital editions too.

The $1/week is a ridiculous grab from people who are unaware that there is a
cheaper option available.

~~~
Lazare
Yep:
[https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/](https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/wired/)

Something squirrelly in the pricing tiers.

~~~
lstamour
Indeed. You can subscribe to digital-only Wired for $19.99 anywhere in the
world, and in the US it includes a print copy too.

I'd consider a $1/week if it covered all Conde Nast publications, or a
significant portion of the internet. By that logic, though, I'd prefer if a
subscription to Texture (Next Issue) or other content services included free
access to the affiliated websites without ads. It adds up quick, but even the
weekly version works out to $3.46/week for basically every magazine I'd care
to read...

Of course ... I'm just saying this. I actually don't read magazines. But I'd
pay for a subscription, especially if I could share it with family.

------
forgotmypw
I have split websites that I visit into two categories:

1) Websites that still render and are readable after uMatrix, uBlock Origin,
and a few other restrictive content filters are done with them. I continue
reading and enjoying these, provided the content is worth my reading time.

2) Websites that are broken, or otherwise make the content inaccessible. For
example, a "dialog" appears over the content, inviting me to join their
newsletter. These sites get the ol' ^W or ⌘W, and after a few visits I learn
to never visit them again.

Also, sites in category #2, are auto-censored anywhere I moderate.

~~~
andyfleming
I feel as though this is my natural reaction as well.

That said, I appreciate how wired is handling the situation and communicating
transparently and reasonably. I may consider white-listing the site simply out
of support.

------
ohthehugemanate
This is a nice post from an organization that clearly cares about their
readers. That's hard to write, and the staff at Wired deserve credit for their
effort to be open and direct with us.

Unfortunately the post fails to address the reasons that their readers USE ad
blockers. If only they had gone a LITTLE bit farther in this post and made
specific promises in exchange for being whitelisted. Here are the promises
that would have convinced me.

\- Third party scripts will be kept to under 33% of page weight. (They're at
~50% for this article, and that's with a 1.1MB gif in the content!)

\- We will respect "do not track" headers in your browser (or settings on your
Wired account) by excluding you from ad- and analytics-related tracking

\- If you have enabled "do not track" headers in your browser, we will only
serve you anonymous ads

\- We may serve you ads based on your browsing behavior at wired.com, but they
will always include a short explanation. For example, "because you were
interested in XXXX:"

\- Our ad placement and content will follow strict limitations (link to a
public page of their guidelines), based on the the Adblock "Acceptable Ads"
rules ([https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-
ads#criteria](https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria)).

\- We will serve all content and ads over HTTPS, from within the wired.com TLD
(or include a list of specific sources), so you can trust that it's really
coming from us.

Since Wired doesn't offer to address any of the issues that make (technical)
people enable an ad blocker, the post is reduced to an ultimatum. They're
asking you to make a special exception for Wired, and offering only a stick as
incentive. No carrot, no quid pro quo, and no addressing your concerns. And
they're doing it on a 3.3MB page with 1.5MB worth of third party ads and
tracking code attached.

Giving an ultimatum to 20% of your readership sounds like a stupid business
strategy, and I doubt it's what the Wired board had in mind. Perhaps they
could learn something from app designers: if something is so objectionable
about your Ux that 20% of your user base uses third party alternatives to get
at your content, try a little market research to improve that Ux. Just do a
cursory investigation into WHAT people find so terrible, and WHY they use the
alternative; consider how you might change your Ux to make that unnecessary.
This is 20% of your userbase who likes your content so much, they find ways to
access it despite a shitty OOTB Ux. It would be a big sacrifice to cut off
such a dedicated (and large) group of fans.

~~~
ohthehugemanate
This was important enough to me that I put it into a blog post:
[https://ohthehugemanatee.org/blog/2016/02/09/an-open-
letter-...](https://ohthehugemanatee.org/blog/2016/02/09/an-open-letter-to-
wired-magazine/)

------
rsuelzer
I'm sure market research has been done. But 52 dollars a year is probably too
high a price for an ad free version of wired. I would pay maybe three or four
dollars a year, which has to be more money than they would possibly make off
of the advertising revenue I would generate in a lifetime.

~~~
jacquesm
> which has to be more money than they would possibly make off of the
> advertising revenue I would generate in a lifetime.

You are so terribly wrong about that.

~~~
rsuelzer
Any links to research on how much advertising dollars the average website
makes per unique visitor would be interesting to read.

~~~
jacquesm
Prime properties such as wired make really good money on their visitors. The
'average website' makes rather a lot less than that (hence the existence of
supply side optimizers).

The online version of the media kit for the wired property:

[http://www.condenast.com/brands/wired/media-
kit/web](http://www.condenast.com/brands/wired/media-kit/web)

No rates quoted but:

[http://adage.com/article/media/digital-cracks-50-ad-
revenue-...](http://adage.com/article/media/digital-cracks-50-ad-revenue-
wired-magazine/238986/)

Lists the ad revenues at 50% of the total (online + print), that was 2013.

Last year:

[http://digiday.com/publishers/two-thirds-wireds-revenue-
digi...](http://digiday.com/publishers/two-thirds-wireds-revenue-digital-
brand-content/)

So you can see why they're panicking, adblockers are taking a significant bite
out of their revenues.

And then there is the print side: (~115K for a full page ad in the print
magazine).

[http://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/2015_WIRED_M...](http://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/02/2015_WIRED_Media-Kit_1_15.pdf)

Is a good primer into how a print/online property such as wired profiles
itself to advertisers.

Still trying to find an actual CPM / CPC rate for wired but no luck so far,
but

[http://monetizepros.com/display-advertising/average-cpm-
rate...](http://monetizepros.com/display-advertising/average-cpm-rates/)

Has premium display sitting at about $10 CPM and that's not a bad number
compared to what I know about this field, the actual rate for a property such
as wired would be a little higher than that (-15% agency fees), but not by
much so that's a good starting point.

------
hackercomplex
The model I would like to see involves micro-payments. I would be willing to
"tip" say $0.10 or $0.15 here and there to instantly unlock certain articles.
I think if this were easy to do then wired and other websites like it would
make a lot more money over all from it's content.

The problem though is that with today's credit card infrastructure the
processing fees make this sort of thing unrealistic, and the emerging
alternative (blockchain tech) is not yet widely enough accepted by consumers
to be useful in this regard.

I think we'll get there eventually, and a new "culture of tipping" on the web
may flourish in a way that is very healthy for the journalistic community as a
whole. It could also mean that for instance a poor person in a remote part of
the world could record a youtube video of some traditional folk art or dance
and then upload it to multiple social platforms and receive material amounts
of money from random visitors within the first few hours without first needing
to "strike a deal with youtube" or anything like that.

This might reorient village life in some areas away from making trinkets to
sell to western tourists and instead towards making traditional creative art
to share with a global audience. This could in theory help counteract the
"westernization effect" that global cultures have been experiencing.

~~~
ec109685
As stated above, Google's Contributor network essentially does this.

~~~
hackercomplex
It looks like a move in that direction for sure and I think that's great. I
personally don't believe that blockchain is the "only way" to make this idea
happen of course. I think that there is an opportunity now for companies to
"preempt" the wide adoption of blockchain tech on the web by offering a
service that provides the same flexibility as blockchain tipping, but with a
more frictionless user experience. I personally believe the key to doing this
effectively will be

1\. support for micro transaction amounts (The PPC business already think in
terms of clicks that are worth a few cents on the dollar, and I think
ultimately the consumer will think like this as well). In other words I think
tipping needs to feel non-material to the consumer, but a dollar.. that's
almost enough to buy a domestic draft beer.

2\. support for truly global payment (tipping) and global remittance with
reliable, flexible, always on time payouts.

It would need to embrace blockchain as a payout method because this is the
only way to offer truely global remittance capability right now. In other
words there's no way to get around blockchain completely so it's better to
support it.

One way this could work would be for the platform to issue it's own alt-coin
which rides on the back of the platform's reputation. Bloggers in diverse
foreign locales where it's difficult or time consuming to receive bank wires
could exchange these alt-coins to whatever they need to arrive at local
currency. The consumer in priveldged markets would be sheilded, so to speak
from thinking in terms of blockchain units because the platform would make it
easy for them to tip and be paid in dollar amounts using the standard payment
methodologies such as bank wires, ACH, and debit/credit cards. This reduces
the amount of friction experienced by the average consumer in the most
developed markets while at the same time enabling participation by people in
the under-developed markets. In this way the platform could be thought to
support a form of "graceful degradation" from a frictionless mobile/web
consumer experience at one end to the complexies of blockchain / currency
exchange at the other end.

3\. Privacy protection

4\. Fairness. The fact that you have your brand reputation tied to the
platform why it's worth hosting not because of direct revenue. In other words
No Squeeze.

5\. A no-hassle embeddable tipping badge that any webmaster can easily
leverage

6\. No demanding of identity documents or tax id numbers while witholding
payout. It should be the responsibility of the webmaster who is being tipped
to comply with his local laws and tax regulations.

I think that if the ball is dropped in any of these areas then some variation
of blockchain will ultimately win.

------
VeilEm
How are they going to detect ad blocking? They're going to have to spend a
long time fighting anti-ad block detection.

You can't trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take
hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.

~~~
fiatmoney
Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG. Good luck building a general-
purpose image parser & modifier, especially on a webpage with embedded
animations.

There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and
ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content _is_ the
ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.

~~~
VeilEm
A monolithic PNG wouldn't have annoying animated ads or videos that push down
content, they wouldn't pop over. They wouldn't be serving malware since it
would come from wired. I would miss the ability to select text, but I wouldn't
be bothered by the ads anymore.

Maybe now if they served a canvas element, and put all the content in that
with animated ads, that would be more bothersome.

------
sauere
Dear Publishers, i do not have a solution for the general problem.

But, the one thing i can tell you: there is no way i will manage premium
subscriptions/accounts for 20 different sites. Not only does this get costly
very fast... but even if it was only $1/month each (it's not!) - handling 20
incompatible logins on 5 different devices, most likely payed via different
payment methods... that is just absurd.

This is not the way to go.

------
kdamken
Oh wired, do you really think we care that much about reading your articles?
Forbes did the same thing, and I just stopped reading forbes articles when
they blocked me.

It's a tough spot to be in for all these companies - they need to make money
and stay in business, but it's rare that any of them are important enough to
the average user to turn off blocking. There are simply too many sites out
there to choose from.

~~~
rpgmaker
I congratulate Forbes in successfully blocking my attempts to read their
articles but I really don't care enough to turn off adblocking on their site.
Usually there are other tabs with articles waiting for me to read and Forbes
just saved me some reading time. That being said I'd probably turn off
adblocking for Wired, I did with The Atlantic a while back but they started to
autoplay their videos and I just blocked them again. How can that practice be
in so widespread use in this day and age? Let's hope Wired isn't doing that.

------
wheatbin
What Forbes did after it had readers turn off their ad blockers is still fresh
in my mind:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbes-
site-after-begging-you-turn-off-adblocker-serves-up-steaming-pile-malware-
ads.shtml)

------
tobltobs
The comments here are full of lame hypocritical excuses. First it was "I don't
wanna ads but I would pay for quality content". Now when outlets give you the
option to pay "It is too complicated to pay every single publisher". When
publisher will join to enable a single payment solution system the excuse of
the day will be "Oh, this is too expensive..."

~~~
tomjen3
I pay for netflix and spotify. I would happily pay more for netflix if it had
a bigger selection. I see no reason not to pay for textflix, but I only
subscribe to one newspaper (the economist) and I have trouble enough reading
it.

------
zipwitch
Wired, and it's multi-billionare owners can stuff it.

Wired has been on a long stead decline ever since it was first sold in the
late 90s. Now they've gotten to the point where they do so little good
journalism that just blacklisting them (to save myself the bother of running
into their adblock block) will be as painless as cancelling my subscription
was after their part in exposing Manning.

------
Aissen
I was about to whitelist the site (which I only visit occasionally), and as I
approached the little uBlock Origin icon, I noticed the little supertext
number: 28. I click on the icon: 28 requests blocked or 42% of the requests
for the page. Thanks, but no thanks.

The absolute first thing one must do before asking people to whitelist is to
reduce the ad footprint.

------
socket0
"Trust us, and everyone connected to us, and everyone connected to them.""

Wired is asking its readership to compromise, without being willing to make
any compromises themselves. They're asking us to trust them on a one-to-one
basis, but that's now how trust works in a network. We have to trust Wired,
and trust every single one of the companies or servers they include content
and scripting from, and trust every single one of the companies or servers
that these companies or servers include content from. We're looking at
trusting at least a hundred actors here, quite likely more.

"Trust us, and only us."

A much better compromise would be to ask us to turn off ad blocking on their
site, while in turn guaranteeing that every single script and asset served on
their domain will also be served from their own servers, after having
undergone at least some type of inspection. Then we at least have a reasonable
basis for trust.

~~~
WWKong
Are you sure Wired is not compromising? Maybe they want to charge $5 but only
charging $1. Will you pay a much higher price for all the things you suggest
Wired should do?

~~~
socket0
Charging one dollar instead of five isn't compromising, that's haggling. I
don't think anyone could begrudge them charging money, it's just that they
don't give their technically savvy audience a real choice. It's either pay up,
or go read something else.

~~~
WWKong
There is a third option, "accept to view ads with the associated ecosystem
which includes tracking". How many more options do you want? At that point
Wired is happy to lose you as a customer. You have anyway dodged the question
on whether you will pay $5. At the end of the day someone has to foot the
bill. Allow them to define their user base and serve them. It is a challenging
time for publishers.

~~~
socket0
Part of the challenge for publishers lies in deciding what they really are.
Following a quantity over quality model might work well for many. On the other
hand, Wired (as distinct from Condé Nast) have traditionally had a different
kind of relationship with their readers. There's an emotional bond between
many in the tech community and the Wired brand, which calls for a higher level
of trust, but at the same time delivers a much more loyal type of readership.

I would probably not pay for access to Wired without advertising, regardless
the price. I am more than willing to pay for services, or access to
information that I can rationalise as an investment, but (apparently like many
others) not for entertainment. On the other hand, I'm more than willing to
disable ad blockers on wired.com, as long as I know everything include is
served from their own network, and that they take my security as seriously as
I do. Some friends can be trusted with unsupervised access to your home, but
those are special friends. Wired have to convince us they're a special friend.

------
aikah
In France we had something called the Minitel, it was basically internet but
the wrong way and centralized, you had to pay more or less depending on which
website you would visit (you'd dial 36 14 for free content , 36 15 for paid
one ... ), it failed because it was obviously the wrong model but it was quite
lucrative for "content providers". The phone company directly handled payement
so there was no friction or paywall.

Here is how a terminal looked like :

[https://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/show...](https://www.element14.com/community/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-9977-113625/minitel4.jpg)

I'm not suggesting to go back to that of course, it was dreadful, but it feels
like current content providers always try to reinvent the Minitel somehow.

~~~
scholia
_> basically internet but the wrong way and centralized_

Actually, Teletel/Minitel wasn't completely centralised. A lot of services ran
from their own servers on an X.25 network....

The UK's inferior Prestel service was completely centralised (well, there was
more than one server, but the servers were identical).

However....

 _> The phone company directly handled payment so there was no friction or
paywall._

That idea certainly worked well at the time. Today, you might want to
subscribe to a "content server" accessed via a VPN.

------
msoad
I wonder why content website don't use Canvas rendering in order to block all
ad-blockers. You either see the canvas, with ads in it or don't see anything
at all. There need to be a compatible ad-network as well. Accessibility is
going to be an issue but if you can solve all of that there is a startup idea
right there!

~~~
jacquesm
It's interesting that you hit on this solution which most likely has been
debated in many a boardroom of companies that see these ad blocker figures
ever on the rise.

The problem is that this 'solution' is not really a solution. It degrades the
web to a fraction of its original use case and it would indicate a drastic
departure from the open standards that got us here in the first place.

In a war - if you want to end it - the idea is to de-escalate. A reasonable
first step from a property such as wired would be to demand from their ad-tech
providers that they get rid of any tracking code and other trickery in their
ad tags and that the ads served would be simple imagery rather than flash
and/or javascript ads that leak an enormous pile of sensitive data about you
to the 'supply side platforms'.

But since that would go hand-in-hand with a reduction in effectiveness they
would then have to de-rate their ad prices or they would have to live with
less income. It appears that wired would rather self destruct or at a minimum
force users to convert directly at rate card prices (a win for them if they do
in signfificant numbers) rather than go down this route. Time will tell if it
is the winning move.

------
incepted
Prediction: in a few days/weeks, Wired will back pedal on this decision under
the pretense that they are listening to the feedback of angry users, while the
reality will be that they have been hemorrhaging readership because of the
decision and reverting it is the only way to try to salvage the mess they
created.

~~~
johnnyfaehell
Why is losing readers who make you no money a bad thing?

It lowers their hosting costs therefore it actually makes them money. People
who don't use adblock, whitelist, pay the fee for ad free all make wired money
and will continue to read it.

~~~
mirkules
Because ad tracking is all about reach. I use ad-blocking, but maybe 80% of my
Facebook friends or Twitter followers don't. When I share an article, there
are potentially 80% of my acquaintances who would see ads. If I never share it
because I couldn't read it, there is zero potential.

------
gottam
They're very shortsighted. I only ever get to wired.com through things like
links from HN so I'm not going to pay them money or disable my adblocker for
the reasons they even list in their own article.

This means since I can't view their articles, I definitely won't be upvoting
them on places like HN since I can't read them, and I'm sure others are in the
same boat.

They could have done this in so many other ways, but they chose the way that
was openly hostile to their viewers. Good luck declaring war on your own
readerbase, wired.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting, what I would like though is "$1 a week on the weeks you read
wired" so lets say I start with a $52 budget, read some stories this week, my
balance drops by $1, if I read nothing for a month, nothing happens, then I go
back and read some stories it goes down $1 for that week. The when it gets
below $10 it sends me an email suggesting I top up, and if it gets below $5
then every time I read a story it reminds me I only have 'n' weeks left.

THAT is a system I would sign up for in a heart beat.

~~~
eps
It should be per-read, not per-week, but then it can't cost $1 a piece, more
like few cents => we are back to micropayments, which proves to be a very hard
nut to crack.

------
funkysquid
I don't use an ad blocker, but I'm thinking of installing one just for wired,
if only to see how they implement this. And because I don't support hiding
content from people who don't want to pay with their eyeballs and privacy, or
maybe can't pay with money.

~~~
digbyloftus
You don't support people not giving their work away for free? I could
understand the privacy argument but "some people can't afford that businesses
product so fuck that business" seems ridiculous.

------
SCdF
> here at WIRED, where we do all we can to write vital stories

I genuinely read "viral stories" the first time I read that sentence, and
thought to myself: that's awfully honest of them.

Speaking more seriously, I'll repeat what I've said before: I have only
started blocking ads in the past 6 months or so, because while in the past I
would simply not visit websites with obnoxious advertisements, there is now
nowhere to go.

And I understand that you need money to pay your staff, and I understand that
the public is not paying you, so someone has to, so that naturally falls to
advertisers, as it has done for a hundred years. But clearly the public isn't
going to let you do that, at least not traditionally.

So I don't know where this is going to end up, but no where good I imagine.
More paid promotions, more "native" advertising, more catering to people who
haven't worked out how to use ad block, more viral "you'll never guess who
farted in the senate" style non-content-- the top two articles right now on
Wired are literally reporting about advertisements. There is advertising
sponsoring them writing about advertisements. My head is spinning.

------
czep
Now that sites are being more aggressive when detecting ad blockers, but they
still want search engines to index the site and so they happily serve content
to the crawlers... Would it be possible to write a browser plugin that can let
your session masquerade as a robot? Even pay walled sites let Google index
their content, that's how they lure unsuspecting chumps to the site. So why
couldn't we have a plugin to imitate a robot, getting the content and by
having to suffer through several megabytes of ad network code?

~~~
jnky
Sure, there are browser plugins to override the HTTP user agent header and in
my experience impersonating Google Bot works quite well. On the other hand,
this tactic runs afoul with sites detecting your UA for browser specific hacks
(especially with HTML5 video) or parts of a sites where bots are blocked by
policy.

Also the IP ranges of search bots are more or less well known, so it would be
trivial for publishers to block this kind of hack, if they wanted.

------
simonswords82
Respect to Wired for attempting to find a solution to their issues but I fear
like many others commenting on this thread that this isn't the solution.

I'd love to see their numbers in a few months - but I doubt that they would
make them public.

Obviously making money via adverts on news websites is a shrinking business. I
wonder if any companies are taking advantage of this to create a new type of
revenue generation machine for publishers? I know micro-payments keep getting
kicked around but they don't seem like the solution here. Any thoughts?

------
a3n
Good. I've been waiting for sites to stop whining, grow a pair and refuse me
and my fellow blockers. I can get along without them, the quality of my life
won't suffer a single decimal place, and they'll gain ... well, I don't know
what they'll gain other than "winning," but whatever.

But I guess one thing to consider is, even if I block, people who I send links
to may or may not block. There's some math that probably needs to be worked
through.

~~~
a3n
Wouldn't it be ironic if blockers were the most valuable viewers, because of
the number of people who follow our recommendations for articles and sites?

------
franciscop
Let me take another view on this. Adblocking _is_ on the rise according to,
basically, everywhere. I've installed it recently in my family computers since
it'll protect them from many nasty stuff besides the ads. However, they are
surely not able to add any site to the whitelist (they just know they don't
get advertising).

Furthermore, with population aging, I think that for the next 10-30 this will
make the adoption even stronger. So let's say that it keeps going on until
most of the people use some adblock. What is the situation then? Let's explore
one option:

No one sees advertising/tracking on the web. Newspapers, magazines and others
have either adapted or died. So, for Wire's example, allowing for an ad-
sponsored site makes no sense since most of the people use adblocking so
there's not much public left. Now I don't know anything about paid online
magazine, but I've read that their numbers are not so great.

So who's left?

\- Websites that do it for free to scratch an itch such as codinghorror and
Joel on Software.

\- Corporate blogs that act like news press to improve the brand. This could
include Tesla's blog, SpaceX's news, etc.

\- Blogs that make it a content strategy so you buy their product such as
GrooveHQ.

\- Personal or professional review sites with referral links.

This is arguably a stronger change than when printed papers went online or
when they went mobile, since their business model remained unchanged. It's a
change of business model, so they will have to adapt somehow.

~~~
CaptSpify
"essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions" \-
[https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebDeathView)

I would miss a lot of the sites that would end up disappearing, but in the
end, I arguably would be better without them anyway. I hope they get to stay,
and we find a solution, but if they don't.... _shrug_

------
jayarcanum
It's funny to see amongst all the stock market rout how companies that are
(now) subservient to the markets have to react to a down market caused by
other bullshit than journalism. The lesson here is Wired, stay true, don't
fucking sell to Conde Nast and remain TRULY independent like real journalists
should so you don't have to fucking suck dick for money when the big old
bullshit tech bubble starts to burst.

~~~
look_lookatme
Who in publishing is surviving as an true independent with even 1/5th of this
staff? [http://www.wired.com/wired-staff](http://www.wired.com/wired-staff)

------
lutusp
> So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if
> you are using an ad blocker.

Suit yourself. Goodbye, Wired, and welcome to reality.

------
ddxv
I unblocked Wired a few months ago, eventually turned it back on because their
popup video ads were so annoying, especially when travelling (slow
connections) or on small touch devices.

Also, I just left that article to leave a comment here, since there is no
comment section on that article, something else that drives me away from
Wired.

------
pargon
Cue all the people who say "Fine, then I won't ever go to Wired's site again."

That's kind of the point, you know.

~~~
bcassedy
While there may be some benefit to avoiding free riders, that definitely is
not the goal. The goal is to hopefully prevent some new installs of ad
blockers with a hope that some of those existing free riders disable their ad-
blockers on Wired or pay a subscription.

~~~
jacquesm
If that was the goal then they went about it in a piss-poor way. The problem
is not the ads, the problem is the tracking.

------
kbart
I wish some company, that could make a difference, pushed for a paper-like ad
service -- no tracking, no sounds&video, no JS, just an old school text and
picture ad. Such service I would gladly whitelist, but at the current state of
advertisement industry whitelisting _any_ site is a no-no.

------
makeitsuckless
If only publishers had put that much thought and effort in sneaking in
increasingly bloated advertising in with http requests for _content_ until the
ratio ads/content was a 100/1, or in massively violating their readers privacy
and becoming complicit in a world wide greed driven surveillance system.

Any ethical policy with regards to ad blocking should start with the word
"sorry", followed by a lengthy apology for two decades of utterly unethical
business strategies.

Instead, we just get another aggressively anti-consumer move in the privacy
arms race.

No tracking if you pay up amounts to blackmail. Publishers like these won't
get a penny from me until they apologize and give up tracking altogether. (Of
course the fact that Wired hasn't been relevant since the late 90s makes this
particular decision a lot easier...)

------
amelius
Time for adblockers to become smarter. IMHO, an adblocker should keep a shadow
DOM, so that the originating site cannot see which DOM elements have been
removed/altered. Also, an adblocker could use a "refresh cookie" strategy, to
effectively disable tracking.

~~~
asgfoi
Methods of both parties will evolve, but ultimately as long as the user has
control over his computer(no hardware DRM), he can display whatever he wants.

~~~
amelius
Here's a nice project idea. Visit a page using multiple cookies, then run OCR
on it to extract the texts from each visit. Then compare the texts, extracting
only the parts which are equal across visits. This should get rid of targeted
ads and ads which vary on each visit. For the remaining ads, use a spam
filter, or use a crowd-sourced database of ads.

------
merb
Soon we will need to pay for every site we visit. That's aweful. I mean I have
nothing against ads, when they are like the Google Ads, and I have nothing
against not running a adblocker, when your site doesn't do 100-200 requests
for a simple site with text.

~~~
colmvp
Mobile usage keeps rising and apps that have a lot of engagement like Facebook
garner incredible amounts of revenue from companies wanting to advertise on
that platform.

The subsequent effect is media ranging from Wired to my local newspapers
continue to lose ad dollars that are funneled to Google/FB. Just as an
example, Buzzfeed smartly made an incredible Facebook video brand in order to
help increase their reach, value to advertisers (via sponsored content) which
helps fund real journalism (akin to the role of comics/crosswords for
newspapers decades ago). Month after month, excellent journalists who used to
work for national newspapers leave or are let go because of decreasing
revenue, whereby they end up moving to Buzzfeed News.

It really irks me that Facebook and Google has so much clout over the
advertising industry.

------
kybernetyk
>On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes
from a reader who is blocking our ads

Only 20% is pretty low for a tech-savvy audience. I'm surprised as I assumed
ad blockers were more wide spread amongst us "computer people".

~~~
mc808
I was also surprised by the 20%, as I thought I had read that it was
approaching 40% across the web (thanks to YouTube, really). I wonder if this
means a significant share of Wired readers had already whitelisted the site.

------
S_A_P
Other comments have mentioned or hinted at this, but I think the only way to
reduce the friction of online subscriptions is to "pool" the content a'la
spotify or apple music. I would pay some amount per month for an all I can
read premium content model just like I pay for music streaming. Having
multiple magazines/providers to choose from would be a big draw for me as I am
not always interested in the content of one provider. I like Wired and have
read their articles on occasion. I even have a subscription to the print
version that I got for airline points I couldnt use elsewhere. I cant see any
other way for me to make the jump.

------
kalzium
Mh, I'd rather much prefer a system like Flattr
([https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)). I used to read Wired a lot, but
I somehow had the feeling that there has been a significant decline in the
quality of the articles (used to have a subscription), so these days I can't
be bothered much.

That's why I'd love something like a "pay per like" system, which let's me
support the quality content I enjoy and boost the people behind it. But I
guess it wouldn't really work out as most people are cheap and lazy - you'd
need to sign up for a new service etc.. :/

------
exodust
For argument's sake, imagine there were 1,000 people using adblock on
Wired.com. They read 10 articles per week, some of which they actually enjoy.

Suddenly, they disable their adblockers.

Now, how much weekly ad revenue does Wired earn from those 1,000 visitors?
There's no way it's $1,000 worth of ad revenue.

In which case, you could be forgiven for thinking this move by Wired is not
about solving the website adblock problem, but more a subscription drive.

As an occasional reader I want a better deal on the subscription. Say, 20
cents per week. Apply a quota, cap my plan, all good. But $1 per week is not
happening, and whitelisting the site is not happening. That's just me.

------
jbclements
I geniunely do feel bad for magazines that are trying to figure out how to
survive in a world of ad-blockers. I suspect that many hard-working
journalists will lose their jobs as magazines like Wired go out of business. I
personally subscribe to several newspapers, and I worry about them, too, and
what's going to happen to journalism in this country (USA, sorry for my
chauvinism).

BUT!

I want to KILL the free internet--that is, the internet that is paid for with
slices of my attention and life. I do believe that advertisers are very good
at extracting my attention and money, and I genuinely do want to destroy that
internet model. What will emerge? I can only cross my fingers.

~~~
jes5199
gift economy?

------
yoz-y
Hm, I wonder what will this do to their advertising revenue. People who are
ready to shell out money for subscription are probably those who were most
likely follow the ads as well (as in, they are ready to part with their dough)

------
NamTaf
I subscribed to their iPad magazine publication for the last several years in
an effort to support them. That weighs in at USD$25/year off memory (NB: non-
US subscribers get screwed for print delivery), which I felt was fair given I
minimially read the magazine itself and just browse their site sometimes, e.g.
when an article is linked from here or I see one on Twitter.

I would've hoped there would be some acknowledgement for their magazine
subscribers, both digital and print. Certainly for print, which costs
significantly more, but even for magazine subscribers who've been around for a
number of years.

------
sroerick
> No tracking

Isn't having an account a form of tracking?

~~~
jacquesm
Compared to what ad networks do I'd say no.

And this is where wired missed the boat here, the article should not have been
titled 'how wired will deal with ad blocking' but it should have been 'how
wired will deal with tracking'.

------
inanutshellus
I love the current ad-based world that lets me get free access to premium
content in exchange for ad views, I just don't want to be profiled.

I'd be SUPER happy to see ads that support a site that didn't track me.

~~~
ethbro
I think the crux of the question though is: how many _more_ ads at the same
site would you be willing to see that don't track you?

Given that a site's costs are fixed, but targeted ad's are worth more than
untargeted.

~~~
inanutshellus
Well the current number is zero..... So any number higher than that is a
winner for both of us, right?

------
EugeneOZ
-20% of people who could share their content in social networks. Ok, who cares.

------
bsder
Everybody was happy to outsource ads.

Then the ads got sufficiently obnoxious that everybody started wiping them
out.

The solution is to insource your ads again and take responsibility. Then
people would quit wiping them out.

But, that will cut into somebody rich dude's profits, and they'll have to ...
ewwwww ... employ somebody.

Or, they can lose completely and go out of business. Their call.

I don't link or read Forbes articles anymore. Cool by me.

Next up, the aggregators will start ripping the content that isn't strongly
paywalled and republishing it. Probably without attribution. Good luck.

------
zevrox
Here is my scholarly response to this article.

Title: How zevrox is going to handle Wired going to handle Ad Blocking

Body: Zevrox will never visit Wired.com and their whiny princess ass again.

------
DanielBMarkham
On Facebook, my feed is full of thousands of amateur writers trying to
interest me with cats, jokes, rants, and family pictures. They also do news,
politics, religion, and anything else they think will get attention (including
like-begging)

On Wired, I got what? 100 folks all doing the same thing only with more taste
and style?

I get the fact that Wired, on average, is better consumable content than
Facebook, but hell, Facebook is _free_. The rest of the net is _free_.

I do not have an answer for the Wired guys, but I gotta admit it's sad/funny
that Facebook and Google are such close partners with so many content
providers. They're the guys driving the bus that's taking you over the cliff.

For the record, I own the device or app that consumes my content over the net.
If I choose to own a device or app that only displays text, or only displays
text from certain domains? That's my business, not yours. You can certainly
turn the spigot off or on, and perhaps you'll get me to pay for you turning it
on, but that's the limit of our interaction on this matter. What kind of
device I use or whether or not I see certain things you want me to see is none
of your freaking business.

In addition, as far as I'm concerned, any information I provide back to the
server about what kind of browser I'm using is highly provisional and subject
to change without notice. It is a courtesy that I provide anything.

It continues to amaze me that people who are in the business of providing
entertainment somehow feel that it's a good thing to go to war with the people
they are entertaining. For the life of me I just don't get how that makes any
sense.

One day somebody is going to write a "meta browser", a browser that opens up
other browsers in invisible windows and surfs the web, then sucks out filtered
content for the user to consume. (There would be a provision for faking out
credentials, spoofing the signature, resetting the cookies, signing up under
assumed/real names, and so forth) Once that day comes, both the browser
vendors an the content providers are going to be unhappy. But that's where
we're headed if this radar vs. radar detector battle continues forward.
Content consumers will win. They always do. (I imagine we're going to see a
big push for legislative relief here. Prepare yourselves.)

------
alkonaut
Again: just serve ads and I'm happy even if it's half the content on the page.
Just don't use tracking ads from ad networks. I don't mind downloading huge
ads and I don't mind the layout including the ads (as long as they are
tasteful, as in the print version of Wired).

Wired is a print mag. They have always struck deals with advertisers to show
dumb ads without impression counts, in their magazine. Just put those ads on
the site!

------
uberweb
[https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer](https://github.com/reek/anti-
adblock-killer)

~~~
nyolfen
helpful hint: this is a listed, but disabled by default, ruleset in ublock's
3rd party filters:
[https://i.imgur.com/XiXspoi.png](https://i.imgur.com/XiXspoi.png)

~~~
e40
Works on forbes.com (not that I care, but I used it to test). Thanks!

------
mstade
> You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a
> week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display
> advertising or ad tracking.

I wish more places would do this. I subscribe to several news outlets, and
none of them provide this option, even for paying customers. It's ridiculous.

Unfortunately for Wired, their content just isn't good enough to warrant the
$52/year price point.

------
Phemist
This is the main reason why I use an Ad blocker (and tracker blocker, etc.)

[http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-
to-b...](http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-
ads/)

These arguments are not even acknowledged by Wired (or any other service that
relies on ads)

~~~
jamespo
except they are by offering a subscription model with no ads

------
joeevans1000
Dear Wired: just sell ads and place them on your page. I'll have no problem
with them. Don't have services track me as I view them. Don't have companies
correlate my viewing of them with more data about me and then sell that data
to yet more companies. It's simple really.

------
tn13
All these publications must for a consortium of sort where I can login into
one website and manage all my subscription and then never ever see any
advertisements.

I don't want to pay wired and forbes and WaPo and NYT and keep track of all
these payments appearing on my credit card. We need a Netflix for web
publishers.

------
kiproping
The best/funniest solution for problems like these is showing cats and dogs
with a Nickolas Cage face, instead of ads for those who have ad-blockers.
There is a site that uses this technique,(8muses .com NSFW), those images are
so distracting you just have to disable ads. It's hilarious.

------
pmontra
I'm using Adblock Plus local proxy on my unrooted Android tablet. I clicked
the link and got a completely white page. I copied the link in Google
Translate and I could read the page (clicked the button for the original
version).

I understand that Wired has to pay its staff but it's a uphill battle.

~~~
pmontra
I add that $1 a week is probably out of touch with reality. It assumes that
people goes to Wired.com to browse articles at least few times per week. I
might be wrong, but people lands there coming from sites like HN or from
Google searches. I'm among this group of people. That means that we read a few
articles per month, maybe none at all. Paying even as little as $1 for
something I might use and maybe not is out of question. Imagine if I'd have to
do that for any random web site I land to. Unfortunately for them the very
existence of the hyperlink and the zillion of other news outlets makes
paywalled site an as sustainable business as paid web browsers.

Still, if I could pay on demand, 1 cent per article, I'll consider it. Show me
an abstract first and remember that I'll remember if your content is really
worth that cent. If you think it's tiny, divide the price of a paper newpaper
by the number of articles it's made of and we get to that order of magnitude.

------
Shivetya
so the end result will be when servers get powerful enough they will simply
bake the ads into the article so at least the visual representation is there
and rotation continues.

As for the content charges, a micro transaction system really needs to take
root for the web. I really don't want to be driven to the poor house with a
dearth of monthlies. Its bad enough with cable, tv, netflix, etc/etc, and now
every damn website. Worse are magazine based companies trying to charge print
subscribers for web content that used to be free.

A dollar a week might not sound like much but if I am not using the site each
week its too much. Set me up an article bank so that my one dollar gets me a
set number of articles and it tracks which I read so I can reread content I
paid for

------
majewsky
"You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker’s whitelist, so you view
ads."

That's cute. I just rolled out network-level adblocking at home to improve the
security of legacy clients (e.g. old un-updateable Android phones). There is
no concept of a whitelist in this approach.

------
fapjacks
Welp. Fuck off, Wired. See ya! And that's _exactly_ what people say when this
happens.

------
FrankenPC
I don't get it. Why is it no one has invented a safe JVM for ad execution so
the site believes they are executing even though nothing is actually getting
through? Is the coding required just too insane to handle?

------
pc86
> _we do all we can to write vital stories for an audience that’s passionate
> about the ongoing adventure of our rapidly changing world_

Can't even finish the first paragraph before the bullshit starts flowing.

------
dalanmiller
They missed a big opportunity by not just linking the $1 ad-free sign up page.

------
JulianMorrison
Nope. If I can't load your article WITHOUT ADVERTS then I simply will move
along. I don't care enough about any one news source to subject myself to
hostile brain hacking attempts.

------
fiatmoney
If there's an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-detectors, the
latter will win. All of the money and incentives are set up for them to do a
better job.

~~~
jacquesm
You can't really 'win' with an ad-blocker-detector, you can only win by
committing virtual suicide on your website. Eyeballs have value other than
just ads, for instance someone might have shared an article in an interesting
way or to a well matching demographic which in turn led to a viral effect.
Very hard to know which part of your audience is the one instrumental to
keeping the flow of traffic up, and 20% is in the danger zone. Keep in mind
that Wired's audience is fairly tech savvy and that is precisely the segment
that may have caused Wired to be as well respected as they are in the first
place. You don't risk alienating that 20% unless you're desperate.

~~~
fiatmoney
Presumably they get desperate, then.

Look, it's easy to wave your hands and talk about viral articles, but
fundamentally they will do what they need to in order to stay alive, or be
replaced by a company that will. You can have micropayments (failed
experiment), subscriptions, or ads. Empirically it seems like ads or other
non-monetary consideration (influence, sponsored content, etc) has outcompeted
subscription-based models for most content. Given that the "war" is entirely
technical & visible to the end user only by the presence or absence of ads,
the question is just whether you'll read a publication that has ads, or not.
Empirically, the general population will.

(This says nothing about how invasive the ads are).

------
dandare
My single visit to read one of their articles generates way less that $1, I am
not sure how much but I guess about $0.01. So, why micropayments never took
off?

------
lawnpuppies
There's a growing trend of trying to nickle and dime the internet. That adds
up fast. It's not a sustainable model in the long run.

------
rbcgerard
It would be one thing if they were just talking about a static image
advertisement, but we are talking about a whole lot more than that...

------
waylandsmithers
So, all going according to plan for Apple right? The best free experience
reading Wired is now through the iOS News app.

~~~
jbuild
Provided the News app actually loads.

------
wnevets
how is adblock detection different from other forms of client side DRM? At the
end of the day you have to trust the client

~~~
orionblastar
Adblock detection is like client side DRM it copy protects the article from
being viewed unless you disable your ad blocker and see ads and get tracked.

There are scripts that foil ad block detection as well. So some people are
fighting back.

It reminds me of file sharing sites like bittorrent sites that people use to
get DRM free versions of products at risk of having their IP scanned by DMCA
bots sending them a C&D letter.

It comes down to when you buy something you don't own it you only buy the
right to use it. Now you only have the right to read articles if you get
exposed to ads and tracking. If you block ads they can take away your right to
read an article.

It is all about rights and how corporations control what you get access to.

Facebook, Google, and others use ads and tracking as well to earn money. Their
sites are free at the cost of your privacy rights.

------
jonawesomegreen
I think its going to be interesting as the anti-adblocker verses anti-anti-
adblocker war heats up.

------
sanatgersappa
Wonder if they've considered Instant Articles. Loads instantly for users and
has ads as well.

------
piyushc1987
It seems like we won't be able to access anything without ads or without fees
in future.

~~~
zipwitch
The billionaires need to extract their rent somehow. (

~~~
yoz-y
Or, you know, their employees.

------
gcb0
the only way out is to get quality content out as much as possible. "portals"
like yahoo have tons more of access than weird. they can easily dilute the ad
blockers, pay the content creators a cut, and everybody ends up happy

------
unexistance
ah nope, they still do the floating horizontal bar, eating the PRECIOUS
vertical screen-estate

ah well, we'll see how it goes, nothing uBlock Origin can't handle :D

p/s: does anyone from Wired is here? to at least read / respond?

------
asgfoi
Here goes another one:

    
    
      echo 127.0.0.1 www.wired.com >> hosts

------
inaudible
I'm a bit shocked that Conde Nast never bothered to work out a digital
advertising strategy that worked. In the magazine business they can sell off
their pages easily because they are essentially part of the content and their
content is influential. They control the client pool and match advertisers
with the brand of content, a reader of Vogue would spend as much time studying
the content of some advertisers because it covered their interests in an
interesting way.

A good friend is a fashion designer and she collects oodles of high end
magazines, they have a heavy cover price and advertising makes up a large
proportion of the pages, but it doesn't matter because the content and
advertising coalesce. The advertising editor is still an important part of the
business and they make certain that their work both reinforces the business
and doesn't tarnish the content. It's a slick alignment.

Something became unstuck with publishing on the web very early, and for
whatever the reason, magazines and periodicals typically gave up exclusively
collating and editing their own advertising material. An industry of third
party providers took that job, providing the initial promise of instant
revenue and later the promise that adverts could be tailored to the eyeballs
of the viewer. But the third parties never came up with a way to nicely
separate their ads from the content that people were attracted to, to give it
the necessary space that makes reading a magazine somehow less bombarding.
They adopted the messy format of banners and placement ads, which wasn't far
away from the newspaper grid. But newspapers were always a different beast
with less refinement, the daily coverage was enough of a compulsion to readers
that it covered the incongruous layout (and the trend for a very long time was
not to pollute the front page with advertising as this would cheapen the
status of important stories and editorials - this came much later). Every ad
technology that they have come up with only aides in their own destruction -
popups, overlays, flash and animated gifs only serve in distracting the
audience enough to irritate.

It's probably too late to reform the industry to make advertising consistent,
relevant and non distracting. The content has already suffered, reputations
are diminished and reputable journalists are becoming far more autonomous in
their output. There was a renewed interest in digital magazine publishing when
the ipad came out, it allowed for more traditional interaction, layout and
perusal, but releasing an app based publication is more involved than
publishing to the web once and there's more mind share in the latter.

It's going to be interesting to watch how the web trends for commercial media.
But at the same time I doubt my fashion friend is about to stop buying
magazines and judging by the content they are becoming more beautiful and
textural with every new publication. Still a viable niche alternative to
screen burn, the adverts look fantastic, and there's zero chance of accidental
malware. No salvation for a suffering industry, but they've been embedded in
the web a very long time and failed pretty badly.

------
uptownJimmy
Goodbye, Wired. Good luck with all that.

------
smegel
> You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week

Wow, a paywall. Did you come up with that idea all by yourself?

------
iolothebard
Arrivederci.

------
bobby_9x
I'm fine with some people using Ad-block because they don't like ads. But,
when it's automatically installed on masses of computers, it starts to really
become a problem.

This will only create a fractured Internet and make it difficult for small
startups to survive.

