Technology
Sites Try Polite Approach in Asking Readers to Stop Using Ad-Blockers
(Business Day) – Ad-blocking has become one of the main scourges of the online publishing and advertising industries.
Software tools that can detect web advertisements and then block them from users’ view have become increasingly popular as consumers fret about things like data collection or the glut of advertising slowing down Web pages.
But ad-blockers have become a major problem for publishers because most of the free content distributed online is supported by advertising revenue. One recent report suggested the issue would lead to $22bn in lost revenue this year as one out of three internet users now employed some software to block ads.
As ad-blocking spreads across the internet, publishers have tried different strategies to deal with the problem, everything from completely disallowing ad-blocking users from viewing content on their sites to paying anti-ad-blocking firms to block the blockers.
