Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

Re:Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outg... by tremon on Monday April 04, 2016 @09:40AM (#11421769)

there is no general way to monetize content

Then, according to the laws of capital dynamics, that content should die out.

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Re:Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outg... by chris_wot on Monday April 04, 2016 @10:20AM (#11422037)

Which is why sites like the Sydney Morning Herald are utterly screwing themselves over. Seriously, go to the SMH now, and check out your ad-blocker. There will be about 60 blocked ads and sites. Then check out the headlines - all click-bait.

Ironically they now have a 30 article a month limit (easily bypassed by switching to private mode in your browser) which actively reduces their ad revenue and messes up their statistics tracking when people switch to private browsing...

In the meantime, Fairfax have been progressively cutting staff. Before it was outsourcing subeditors to New Zealand (and it shows, there are an unbelievable number of unreadable sentences, along with grammar and spelling errors - even in their headlines they show on their main page!) and now they are about to shed more than 100 jobs in actual journalism.

I once subscribed to the SMH, but then the quality got so bad that I just cancelled. They can't even get their comments section right - it's barely usable, and they don't even get threading reasonably correct.

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