I actually purchased a subscription because I do want to support the paper but not deal with the nightmarish ads that make the site basically unusable. However after logging in, the site immediately demands that I disable blocking third party cookies. I've been in touch with the subscription department without luck, so at this point I am looking to cancel my subscription. Pity - I really wanted to support the paper, but they make it basically impossible to do so.
Your ad sales and IT team are killing your company. They are taking your good product, the journalism and your well written Javascript, and they are smearing a thick paste of shit all over it. Some of this shit is visible, like the grocery circular popover and the auto-loading video ads. Some of it is invisible, like the 10 megabytes/minute I blogged about. But that shit has a smell. Readers don't like getting shit on their hands when reading the newspaper. They don't like smelling shit. They will stop going to your website.
The ROI on cleaning up the ads tech mess will not be immediate. It will probably be negative in the short term. But in the long term it's the only way to save the newspaper. I'm anxious about the future of the newspaper business too and don't know what the solution is. But I'm sure it's not this ad escalation.
Exactly. Ever since the LA Times started blocking ad blockers, I do not visit it. If I accidentally click on a LAT link, I'm quickly reminded that I don't want to be there and close the tab.
That being said, I believe the media companies should start accepting the inevitable fact that people don't care about their financial struggles or hardships in finding ways to monetize content. As long as the said content is visibly free (even if it comes with strings attached as invisible tracking) then the people will continue to believe it's free and the more technical users like myself will go the extra mile to actively impede your tracking. You can't escape from that.
I would actually pay for good journalism. But as a possible consumer of the theoretical good journalism, I can't trust anyone. Every month there are news about very shady ads or nasty ransomware snuck through ad networks. How can I trust anyone who is after making money in the industry?
Both the ad and publisher industry have repeteadly shown their profits are their most important priority, not the readers safety. This is never gonna change, they must make money.
I can understand their motives but I have zero sympathy for them due to the methods they employ.
If they are smart business people, they have to sit and actively think of new and non-intrusive ways to monetize content, like right now. The current publishing and monetization models golden days are long behind them, all of the companies are fighting over scraps (obviously I can't prove this but I believe it's a legit theory, judging by the desperate methods) and the bean-counters should stop trying to beat this game and rather look for a new game.
There's also still physical newspapers. You could go up to your nearest little shop and, for just a few dollars really, try out a couple of the newspapers. You can get a different one every day, see how they compare, then you can subscribe to that one!
There, now you can pay for good journalism, and support that radical new monetization model.
As for physical newspapers, I hear they were decent once, but nowadays they're all so shitty around here that I believe one is better informed by not reading them, as at least it's easier to keep an open mind on issues, than after having been fed heavily distorted facts.
We have something in the neighborhood of 30+ ad partners. Some of those partners have decent code, others are really terrible. The IT team only adds the code to allow ad networks to inject their advertisements.
Because of the performance issues and the disreputable nature of some of the ad networks we have discussed the possibility of building our own ad server. However this takes time and money, I don't know the ROI of such an endeavor. Ultimately sale's job is to generate revenue so we partner with nearly every single ad network that can generate money. It's not desirable to deal with all these different ad providers, but you don't need me to tell you about the challenges the newspaper industry is dealing with. We need to bring in money on the digital side to make up the downward trajectory of print ads.