This doesn’t count the people who read the newsletter online or on the Bloomberg terminal (where I typically read it). I didn’t even know there was a newsletter till recently.

Oh right, I forget that the people in finance day to day are accessing via the terminal.

You can also access the Bloomberg website and disable javascript and the article will load. Most adblockers have a disable javascript for this page feature

You can also add a ‘.’ after the TLD to bypass the block for any Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com./path-to-article

that's amazing, do you know why it works?

The dot after the TLD represents the root domain. From right to left, URLs read from least to most specific. Root -> TLD -> domain -> subdomain (eg www). The root domain is almost always left out, because it’s always the same and its presence is implied. But if you include it explicitly, it is a distinct URL.

So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match URLs won’t necessarily see the two versions as identical. This is actually something worth testing your own sites against, to make sure including the root domain doesn’t do something dumb like bypass authentication or whatever.

Edit: also, forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know w/ regard to the root domain and stuff.

This is 50% of the reason, the other half is that all the tracking/ad requests hit an API endpoint on bloomberg.com (no dot at the end), which is now a separate origin as far as the same-origin policy is concerned. But the code is not expecting this to be the case, and doesn't set any CORS headers on the response, and the browser denies access to the response data.

This breaks the ads but also breaks any interactive charts, etc. that need data from the API.

New to me and I've been programming web for quite a while. I've only ever seen that final "." in DNS records, it never occured to me that it would affect logic within the site.

The trailing "." becomes practically important if you have a client that believes in DNS search suffixes (yuck!). I imagine it might have some effect in this particular case if the user-agent includes the dot in the "Host" HTTP request header and it thus evades some non-canonicalizing layer of Bloomberg's paywall thing, while still being a perfectly okay request to the rest of the chain.

You know what’s also missing if you go to bloomberg.com./? All of the ads, and the animated stock ticker. I’m on mobile so didn’t dig into it further, but I bet that all JS loaded on request from another domain (probably including the paywall) is absent or broken.

The site itself loads fine though, because DNS still works and whatever routing layer in their app probably doesn’t care about the domain, just the path that follows it.

I once got a verbal C&D from a Novell web dev because they answered to any domain and I pointed (as a joke) a domain to their IP. Google ended up indexing, and customers were asking what 'reallystrangedomain.com' was when they searched for Novell error messages.

They asked me to stop 'mirroring' their content, and didn't understand I was just pointing my domain to their servers. I stopped, but part of me didn't want to.

Edit: Looks like archive.org picked it up: http://web.archive.org/web/20110623134639/http://thebergenef...

It shouldn't. It is the fault of hacky protocols like HTTPS that conflate routing with identity. If we had DNSSEC and IPSEC from the beginning, it wouldn't have been necessary to do it on application level.

The browser's same-origin-policy would still exist the same way without HTTPS.

I tried it and it only gives me a separate counter (i.e. 3 free articles on "bloomberg.com." in addition to the ones on "bloomberg.com".) This makes me suspect local storage or cookies.

An easy way to do this on iOS Safari is to “Show Reader View” after clicking on any Bloomberg article.

Hope they don't see this.

You can even set Safari to automatically go into reader mode for all websites (I do this, then whitelist the sites/webapps). 9 times out of 10 this is much more readable and is darkmode by default.

You can also set reader mode automatically for just certain websites instead (i.e. whitelist vs blacklist); I do this for Bloomberg, Medium, WaPo, and others.

they almost certainly already know this and dont care

(Also, I believe all normal browsers allow disabling javascript in the devtool settings — my adblocker doesn’t because it’s just /etc/hosts.)

If you clicked to the comments and are debating reading more... here's a passage from the above link:

"So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."

And if you need _even more_ motivation after reading the above:

> Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those -- one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS hospices to put their names on the contracts.

This column truly is a classic.

only 150k? that's seems like huge for something which is almost a niche. How many people subscribe to newsletters? on these people how many are interested about the opinion of one guy on the details of market finance?

If you mean email newsletters generally, my own biggest is 172k but I know folks like The Skimm or the Morning Brew run into low millions of subs. A lot of it is down to how valuable and targeted the audience is and this guy is clearly winning on that front.

I thought something similar. Just to contextualize that number the LA Times only has 170 thousand digital subscribers.

And almost all of them in LA, even with a bias from it being digital so that's how you get it if you want it outside of LA.

Compared to Levine, who has me, in the UK, as a subscriber.

He has a way bigger potential audience than the LA Times.

Dude matt levine is a legend. I think that despite having no connection with the finance industry.

How does one sign up for his free newsletter?

Just as an FYI, he is on parental leave right now. So the newsletter is in pause mode for a few months.

Thank you!

Thank you!