Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Ad blocking
Author: Oliver Breidenbach Posted: 5/9/1999; 6:36:27 AM Topic: Check your pages in iCab... Msg #: 5873 (In response to 5836) Prev/Next: 5872 / 5874
Hi there,recently, Siemens, with great hype, introduced a standalone ad blocker in Germany which was a huge success with the users and caused great grief with the content providers.
Ads are the business model of the internet today. If you block them, the only alternative is to pay for the content.
A friend of mine is technical director at Germany´s leading news site. They were toying with various ideas on how to make their cause known to the people using the ad blocker. For example they were doing what Dave suggested. Another idea was to blend in a text in every page that says "this page cost $5000 to create". After a while they noticed that there are ways around the ad blocker. Now they have the ads delivered in HTML instead of images files when the page is called by a person with the ad blocker.
Confronting the Siemens product manager about this, the product manager responded that the content providers would just have to come up with more clever ways to advertise. One way is to mask ads as editorial content. Which is exactly what the people with the ads turned off don´t want.
Cheers,
Oliver.
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