You use Facebook as a place to post and store photos, dumb memes, and articles about the political foofaraw du jour. Facebook uses Facebook as a way to gather direct profiles for billions of souls that can be advertised to, and as a way to make money selling those ads. There’s a natural tension there, when Facebook wants you to be the product and you would rather not. These days, that tension is evolving into something like an advertising cold war. [More]
ad blocking
Google Wants To Make Mobile Ads Less Annoying By Making Them Load Faster
By 7.19.16
Mobile ads are horrible. They eat up too much data [link] and load slowly, resulting in a growing number of wireless users turning to ad-blockers. In an effort to improve the mobile browsing experience — and, oh yeah, protect its sizable stream of ad revenue — Google is looking to speed up load times for ads. [More]
Study: Ads On The Mobile Web Don’t Just Suck, They Suck Up Valuable Data
By 3.17.16
You’ve got a limited allotment of monthly LTE data to use, so you’re careful with it. You just load up the news and read it — on a reputable website — while waiting for a coffee or the bus, let’s say. And yet at the end of the month you’ve used way more data than you feel like you should have. The culprit? Those annoying ads that get in your way anyway. [More]
European Wireless Carriers Want To Block Customers From Seeing Ads On Smartphones
By 2.19.16
A growing number of people are choosing to use ad-blocking technology to prevent ads from loading on their smartphones, resulting in billions of dollars of unearned ad revenue by publishers. But what if the choice to block ads wasn’t yours, but was a network-wide ban on ads from your wireless carrier? [More]
Want Wired.com Without Ads? That’ll Be $3.99/Month
By 2.8.16
With billions and billions of ad dollars going unearned by websites each year because of the increase use of ad-blocking technology, it’s no wonder that some publishers are fighting back. Last year, magazine giant Conde Nast started erecting virtual walls to prevent ad-block users from visiting some of its sites, and now the company is going to try to give these anti-ad readers the option of a monthly access model for Wired.com. [More]
GQ Website Gives Ultimatum To Readers: Disable Ad-Blockers Or Pay Up
By 12.28.15
With ad-blocking apps and plugins preventing U.S. content companies from earning some $22 billion a year off your eyeballs, some sites are throwing down the gauntlet and demanding that readers pay up if they want to avoid ads. [More]
Use AdBlock And Yahoo May Block You From Reading Your E-Mail
By 11.20.15
If you still live in 2003 and have a Yahoo e-mail account but also use Ad Block to, ya know, block ads, then the folks at Yahoo might have a nasty surprise for you when you go to check your inbox. [More]
Firefox’s Private Browsing Mode Can Now Block Invasive Online Ads
By 11.3.15
Any decent web browser has some sort of incognito browsing mode that adds at least the appearance of a more private user experience. Now the folks behind the Firefox browser say their latest update includes an enhanced Private Browsing mode that limits tracking to the point of actually blocking some ads. [More]
With Ad-Blockers Coming To iPhone, Ad Industry Poised For A Fight
By 9.4.15
According to one estimate, some $22 billion in online ad revenue was lost last year because so many people use ad-blocking plugins on their web browsers. And that number is set to soar with an upcoming tweak to Apple iOS that will allow ad-blocking on the iPhone and iPad’s Safari browser. The ad industry is looking at a number of ways to stem this tide, including the legal route. [More]
Ad Blockers Will Prevent You From Seeing $22B Worth Of Unwanted Ads This Year
By 8.10.15
Are you using an ad blocker on your web browser? If so, you probably don’t care what’s behind those grayed-out boxes where the ads are supposed to be. The folks who do care are the websites you visit, because they aren’t getting ad revenue from those grayed-out boxes. A new report says that ad-blocking will result in nearly $22 billion in lost ad revenue worldwide this year. [More]
AdBlock Plus Still Either Making Advertising Tolerable Or Shaking Down Publishers
By 2.4.15
Ad-blocking browser extensions can make Web-surfing tolerable when you find ads that are animated, pop up, or produce sound tedious. However, users’ ad-eschewing ways are bad for content providers that support themselves with sponsors. The extension AdBlock Plus tries to find a compromise between these competing interests, allowing the least offensive ads through. For a price. Now we’ve learned that big companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are paying to have ads let through the system. [More]
