H/t reader squodgy:
“Knowing I.U. try so hard to avoid falling into the mellee selling their souls to the marketing moguls, this article hit home, and is worthy of consideration by readers like me who are thoroughly pissed off & frustrated at page links being hijacked by drivel or undesirable crap or products I am just not interested in.”
Yes, I have done everything to keep I.U. open to all and free from advertisements, BUT that makes this website totally dependent on donations for income and the website is right now earning less than $5/ €5 per day, which is unsustainable.
If there would be more donations, then they would help me to continue with this work and to prepare for what is coming and enable me to help others, who do not have the means to prepare, but the financial situation of the website doesn’t look good to say the least.
And were it not for some readers the financial situation of the website would be devastating.
However, I will continue with my work and when the greatest financial/economic collapse in world history will take place (maybe already this October), then a lot of things will change anyway.
– To adBlock or Not Block, That is the question:
Source: Blacklisted News Staff
Wow…
The response from the 10% of readers that are filtering advertisements was overwhelmingly negative. This is not really a surprise.
With that considered, we have decided not to use the popup blocker which was encouraging those readers to support the website with a minimum donation or by whitelisting BlacklistedNews.com on their adblockers.
But the story doesn’t end there. Regardless of what, if anything we might do here at BLN, the fight continues elsewhere. More web destinations and advertisers are already implementing services that serve advertisements exclusively to adblock users.
So how do adblockers make money by providing free service?
The answer is simple and obvious: these companies in many cases sell your information to those same advertising companies.
Native advertising companies like Taboola are paying (what I would consider extortion money) for these companies to white-list there ads to adblock users. This trend will continue because the majority of users that enjoy ablocking are not paying for adblocker software.
Who will win the adwars to come?
It is hard to say. Companies like facebook have virtually endless resources to fight and lobby and are already taking on the adblockers. It is just the beginning of the back and forth battle to keep advertising going on their social network.
Will it fail like internet paywalls have over the past few years?
Because it is only a small segment of people who use adblocking software it won’t have the huge impact a total paywall would have. At this point no one knows how it will end, but the battle will be bloody, and it’s only a matter of time before governments will get involved on the behalf of big media.
As the Coin Telegraph notes in an article titled: Breaking EU Cookie Laws: Advertising and Adblock War Continues:
The specific action we are talking about here is of course the addition of ad blocking software by individuals who want to block advertising.
However there are some web publishers that are still keen on displaying advertisements for the reason of garnering revenue or otherwise. They have been lately using special software to sniff out ad-blockers.
This has led to quite a lot of conflict of interests between people who want to protect their privacy by installing ad blockers and content publishers who want to continue to stream advertisements.
As recently as March 2016, Digiday.com reports that Forbes, the popular financial magazine, and Adblock Plus exchanged heated discussions in Austin, Texas over how and which advertisements are streamed on the web.
Forbes is notably famous now for denying readers access to its content if they are found to be using adblocking software. Ironically though Adblock Plus itself is streaming what it calls acceptable advertisements now.
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