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How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

249 pointsby rschroedover 9 years ago

91 comments

fencepostover 9 years ago
I&#x27;m generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads <i>today</i> is safe, who&#x27;s to say what&#x27;s going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering.<p>After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains and for types of requests&#x2F;actions on domains, I still don&#x27;t see any ads but I do see an ever-increasing list of third-party sites Wired is pulling requests from. Given a choice between throwing up my hands and saying &quot;Fine, f*ckit, do whatever the hell you want&quot; and whitelisting Wired&#x27;s requests to all of (disqus, optimizely, amazon-adsystem, condenastdigital, demdex, typekit, adobetm, chartbeat, cloudfront, doubleclick, googleadservices, googlesyndication, googletagservices, mediavoice, mookie1, omtrdc, outbrain, parsely, scorecardresearch, yldbt and zqtk) plus whatever others would be pulled in were I actually to whitelist, I guess I&#x27;ll have to do without Wired.<p>So far without ever actually loosening things up far enough to see ads that&#x27;s AT LEAST 21 different top-level domains Wired is pulling from, not counting its own (and yes, I realize it&#x27;s part of Conde Nast). Most of those top-level domains have at least 2 subdomains being pulled from, sometimes more. My basic reaction to this is that even if I trust Wired and Conde Nast, I don&#x27;t know that I trust all those other sites like &quot;mookie1,&quot; &quot;yldbt,&quot; &quot;zqtk&quot; and whatever other obscurely-named domains.<p>Frankly, were I to see &quot;yldbt&quot; or &quot;zqtk&quot; as a running process or folder name on a system I was working on, I&#x27;d immediately rename them and start virus and malware scans.<p>So I guess my reading of Wired online will suffer much the same fate as my reading of Wired on paper, because while I like seeing occasional items from Wired it&#x27;s not a daily destination for me, and I&#x27;m certainly not coughing up $50+&#x2F;year for it.
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isomorphicover 9 years ago
&gt; So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker.<p>Good luck with that, Wired.<p>The people-who-will-never-pay group will split into two: People who never visit your site again, and people who up the ante in the ad-blocking escalation.<p>While you may think that you don&#x27;t care about the people-who-will-never-pay group, the latter subgroup will release their improved ad-blocker, allowing the people-who-might-have-paid group to continue blocking ads.<p>I don&#x27;t see this ending well for any party involved.
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ljoshuaover 9 years ago
As has been mentioned elsewhere, my exact problem with this&#x2F;Forbes approach&#x2F;elsewhere is that there is no way that I want to suddenly start managing several new monthly subscriptions for all these outlets.<p>I enjoy Wired, but the thought of adding yet another subscription to my monthly credit card statement is too great a cognitive load for me to want to make the jump. Also, if you were to subscribe to the dead tree version, you get 6 months of dead tree + digital + a <i>physical object</i> (battery) for $5 that comparing it to $4&#x2F;mo for digital only feels cheap.<p>I don&#x27;t mind paying a small amount for reading the occasional article, but I don&#x27;t want to manage a ton of new subscriptions.<p><i>Suggested Solution:</i><p>Now micropayments have never taken off for much the same reason, but what if I funded one general &quot;content publishers&quot; account with the equivalent of that $3.99&#x2F;mo? When I get to a paywalled&#x2F;ad-block unfriendly site, I could choose to fund that particular article using a micropayment from my general fund. I would have only one subscription to manage, would feel good about contributing to content I felt was quality, and people would get paid.<p>Of course, this takes content publisher buy-in, but if they&#x27;re already in the process of trying new things, how about it? Feels a little similar to the failed Google Contributor project, but with more direct decision making. Can someone go and build a great business out of this for me?
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jacquesmover 9 years ago
Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess.<p>If you feel $1 per week ($50 &#x2F; year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired&#x27;s are worth CPM rates that you&#x27;d probably not believe.<p>Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it.<p>This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will survive the transition, at the same time they don&#x27;t seem to understand that to lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience (that high?). After all, it wasn&#x27;t the users that decided to substitute &#x27;ads&#x27; with &#x27;tracking&#x27;, &#x27;visual garbage&#x27; and &#x27;malware&#x27; it was the properties and the advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.<p>But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made &#x27;advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card&#x27; into their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.<p>Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your adblocker that you won&#x27;t be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.<p>I&#x27;ve seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to <i>never</i> want to disable all my ad blockers, we&#x27;ll see if there is a wired article that pushes me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the cut.<p>Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not rely on a centralized entity.
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vinceguidryover 9 years ago
Oh well, there goes another outlet. They can all do this, I don&#x27;t care. Just won&#x27;t read their content. Eventually there won&#x27;t be any good non-paywalled content left, and I&#x27;ll just figure something else out.<p>They want my money, they&#x27;re going to have to either pay off the mob (Adblock Plus) or get together with all the other news outlets and give me a one stop shop option.<p>No way am I going to manage dozens of $1 a week subscriptions, logins, and such just to read articles linked to by Hacker News. Your content just isn&#x27;t that important to me, sorry.
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jordighover 9 years ago
&gt; We know that there are many reasons for running an ad blocker, from simply wanting a faster, cleaner browsing experience to concerns about security and tracking software<p>Sigh, again, these are just the incidentals of ads. I wish everyone was just completely honest about what ads are for: they are ploys to manipulate viewers into buying things that they did not need until they watched that ad. Ads are not some goodwill clever mechanism to keep magazines in business. The purpose of ads is not to keep Wired in business.<p>That being said, I think Wired is completely in their right to escalate in the adblocking arms race. I just wish that they were honest about the rules of engagement: either you are open to the possibility of acquiring a purchasing need that you did not have until you watched an ad, or you do not read Wired&#x27;s articles.<p>Or like Hobbes said to Calvin...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ignatz.brinkster.net&#x2F;cimages&#x2F;joyce.gif" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ignatz.brinkster.net&#x2F;cimages&#x2F;joyce.gif</a>
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Falkon1313over 9 years ago
&gt;We want to offer you a way to support us while also addressing those concerns<p>Then actually address those concerns, rather than just telling us to ignore them (whitelist) or pay up.<p>I don&#x27;t care about ads, really. Yes they are a petty annoyance, but I grew up with magazines, newspapers, TV, and radio all supported by ads. However, the way they presented their ads was markedly different.<p>* Their ads didn&#x27;t invite dozens of third parties to spy on everything I do.<p>* Their ads didn&#x27;t break into my home, rifle through my things, and set up operations doing potentially illegal activities in my basement.<p>* When I wanted to read a 1-page article in their magazine, yes they showed me some ads, but I didn&#x27;t have to pay the full cost of having a 20-volume encyclopedia delivered to my house just for the ads on that page.<p>Find a way to advertise without constantly assaulting the reader. Actually address your readers&#x27; concerns instead of downplaying them and knowingly causing harm to your readers. You have other options. Taking them, and proving that you can be successful without being evil, that would make a difference.
tokenadultover 9 years ago
<i>Forbes</i> has been doing this for a while on its website. (Or, at least for a while it has been detecting the ad blocking-software that I have been using for much longer.) I have basically stopped reading <i>Forbes</i> (which maybe was a good idea on other grounds) and have learned to appreciate stories from competing publications. If <i>Wired</i> doesn&#x27;t want my eyeballs to visit its site, I&#x27;ll just stop bringing them there.
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quotemstrover 9 years ago
I use Google Contributor [1], which _effectively_ functions as an ad blocker, one that compensates website owners for the ads they&#x27;re not displaying.<p>A different, but equivalent, way of looking at the product is that Google Contributor lets me essentially enter a op ad in the advertising auction for any web page I visit; if my bid wins, I see a placeholder instead of the ad. One nice side effect of this scheme is that the ads that do make it through are generally of high quality, since they&#x27;re the ones for which some advertiser managed to outbid me.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;contributor&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;contributor&#x2F;welcome&#x2F;</a>
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elorantover 9 years ago
If I was dying to read a Wired article I could just google it. I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;ll be a cached copy somewhere. If that were to fail then I&#x27;d just drive a headless browser to the url, or even a bot, and pull the content out. Thankfully, I&#x27;m not that desperate to do either. Wired doesn&#x27;t have as much leverage as they think they do. And frankly, for a technology flagship as they used to be, I&#x27;d expect them to work with the community, not against it. Find a bulletproof way to serve malware-free ads and serve them from your domain and I&#x27;d gladly whitelist your site. Otherwise I&#x27;m not risking it.
outside1234over 9 years ago
&gt; we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker<p>well, i will restrict my viewing of WIRED.com then. Like completely.
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klungerover 9 years ago
I actually think this is a reasonable move for them. They have to pay their staff and keep the lights on while producing their content. It is kind of entitled and ridiculous for readers to think the party of well-researched, well-written and insightful content for free could go on forever. You either should have to pay for it explicitly with a subscription fee, or consent to ads and tracking. Yes, there is a lot of mediocre fluff&#x2F;stuff there, but there is easily $1&#x2F;week worth of high quality content imho.<p>And, if you do not want to partake, then don&#x27;t. No one is making you read Wired. But, I strongly suspect that publishers that want to keep producing high quality content without running themselves into the ground, as ad blockers become more prevalent, are going to go down this road. The folks here that saying &quot;Ad blockers or bust!&quot; are going to be left with increasingly fringe and lower quality content in the future.
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hackuserover 9 years ago
I don&#x27;t mind ads but I do mind tracking.<p>* If Wired would implement a solution that provides confidentiality to users, following the approach of The Intercept [1], I would have no problem with it.<p>* If Wired would show me ads I was interested in, I&#x27;d be happy to see them (assuming my confidentiality is preserved).<p>* If Wired would provide a way to pay them without having to go through another website registration and credit card payment process, I&#x27;d pay them. I don&#x27;t have time to register for and pay every website I read using the current systems, and Wired isn&#x27;t at the top of my list.<p>If users are so annoyed by part of your website that they are investing time and effort in disabling it, perhaps the problem is with your website.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;what-the-intercepts-new-audience-measurement-system-means-for-reader-privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theintercept.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;what-the-intercepts-new-...</a>
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jmsmistralover 9 years ago
You can innovate around the issue, like some of the comments mention.<p>You should focus on growing sustainably, instead of selling yourselves to advertisers for quick cash. God knows there are a plethora of other places we can get our content from. There&#x27;s enough information pollution in our daily lives - I won&#x27;t accept you polluting my reading of your &#x27;well-written&#x27; articles.<p>So, in summary... good riddance.
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mark_l_watsonover 9 years ago
I like the idea of paying for subscriptions for no-ad service. However, the $1&#x2F;week seems a little high. I might read 10 to 20 articles a year on wired.com.<p>I do pay subscriptions for things that I use (almost) daily: Hulu no commercials version, Netflix, and Google Music.<p>So, good idea, but I would expect a subscription to perhaps cost $10 to $15&#x2F;year. Just my opinion...
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forgotmypwover 9 years ago
I have split websites that I visit into two categories:<p>1) Websites that still render and are readable after uMatrix, uBlock Origin, and a few other restrictive content filters are done with them. I continue reading and enjoying these, provided the content is worth my reading time.<p>2) Websites that are broken, or otherwise make the content inaccessible. For example, a &quot;dialog&quot; appears over the content, inviting me to join their newsletter. These sites get the ol&#x27; ^W or ⌘W, and after a few visits I learn to never visit them again.<p>Also, sites in category #2, are auto-censored anywhere I moderate.
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ohthehugemanateover 9 years ago
This is a nice post from an organization that clearly cares about their readers. That&#x27;s hard to write, and the staff at Wired deserve credit for their effort to be open and direct with us.<p>Unfortunately the post fails to address the reasons that their readers USE ad blockers. If only they had gone a LITTLE bit farther in this post and made specific promises in exchange for being whitelisted. Here are the promises that would have convinced me.<p>- Third party scripts will be kept to under 33% of page weight. (They&#x27;re at ~50% for this article, and that&#x27;s with a 1.1MB gif in the content!)<p>- We will respect &quot;do not track&quot; headers in your browser (or settings on your Wired account) by excluding you from ad- and analytics-related tracking<p>- If you have enabled &quot;do not track&quot; headers in your browser, we will only serve you anonymous ads<p>- We may serve you ads based on your browsing behavior at wired.com, but they will always include a short explanation. For example, &quot;because you were interested in XXXX:&quot;<p>- Our ad placement and content will follow strict limitations (link to a public page of their guidelines), based on the the Adblock &quot;Acceptable Ads&quot; rules (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adblockplus.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;acceptable-ads#criteria" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adblockplus.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;acceptable-ads#criteria</a>).<p>- We will serve all content and ads over HTTPS, from within the wired.com TLD (or include a list of specific sources), so you can trust that it&#x27;s really coming from us.<p>Since Wired doesn&#x27;t offer to address any of the issues that make (technical) people enable an ad blocker, the post is reduced to an ultimatum. They&#x27;re asking you to make a special exception for Wired, and offering only a stick as incentive. No carrot, no quid pro quo, and no addressing your concerns. And they&#x27;re doing it on a 3.3MB page with 1.5MB worth of third party ads and tracking code attached.<p>Giving an ultimatum to 20% of your readership sounds like a stupid business strategy, and I doubt it&#x27;s what the Wired board had in mind. Perhaps they could learn something from app designers: if something is so objectionable about your Ux that 20% of your user base uses third party alternatives to get at your content, try a little market research to improve that Ux. Just do a cursory investigation into WHAT people find so terrible, and WHY they use the alternative; consider how you might change your Ux to make that unnecessary. This is 20% of your userbase who likes your content so much, they find ways to access it despite a shitty OOTB Ux. It would be a big sacrifice to cut off such a dedicated (and large) group of fans.
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rsuelzerover 9 years ago
I&#x27;m sure market research has been done. But 52 dollars a year is probably too high a price for an ad free version of wired. I would pay maybe three or four dollars a year, which has to be more money than they would possibly make off of the advertising revenue I would generate in a lifetime.
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hackercomplexover 9 years ago
The model I would like to see involves micro-payments. I would be willing to &quot;tip&quot; say $0.10 or $0.15 here and there to instantly unlock certain articles. I think if this were easy to do then wired and other websites like it would make a lot more money over all from it&#x27;s content.<p>The problem though is that with today&#x27;s credit card infrastructure the processing fees make this sort of thing unrealistic, and the emerging alternative (blockchain tech) is not yet widely enough accepted by consumers to be useful in this regard.<p>I think we&#x27;ll get there eventually, and a new &quot;culture of tipping&quot; on the web may flourish in a way that is very healthy for the journalistic community as a whole. It could also mean that for instance a poor person in a remote part of the world could record a youtube video of some traditional folk art or dance and then upload it to multiple social platforms and receive material amounts of money from random visitors within the first few hours without first needing to &quot;strike a deal with youtube&quot; or anything like that.<p>This might reorient village life in some areas away from making trinkets to sell to western tourists and instead towards making traditional creative art to share with a global audience. This could in theory help counteract the &quot;westernization effect&quot; that global cultures have been experiencing.
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VeilEmover 9 years ago
How are they going to detect ad blocking? They&#x27;re going to have to spend a long time fighting anti-ad block detection.<p>You can&#x27;t trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.
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sauereover 9 years ago
Dear Publishers, i do not have a solution for the general problem.<p>But, the one thing i can tell you: there is no way i will manage premium subscriptions&#x2F;accounts for 20 different sites. Not only does this get costly very fast... but even if it was only $1&#x2F;month each (it&#x27;s not!) - handling 20 incompatible logins on 5 different devices, most likely payed via different payment methods... that is just absurd.<p>This is not the way to go.
kdamkenover 9 years ago
Oh wired, do you really think we care that much about reading your articles? Forbes did the same thing, and I just stopped reading forbes articles when they blocked me.<p>It&#x27;s a tough spot to be in for all these companies - they need to make money and stay in business, but it&#x27;s rare that any of them are important enough to the average user to turn off blocking. There are simply too many sites out there to choose from.
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wheatbinover 9 years ago
What Forbes did after it had readers turn off their ad blockers is still fresh in my mind: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20160111&#x2F;05574633295&#x2F;forbes-site-after-begging-you-turn-off-adblocker-serves-up-steaming-pile-malware-ads.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20160111&#x2F;05574633295&#x2F;forbe...</a>
tobltobsover 9 years ago
The comments here are full of lame hypocritical excuses. First it was &quot;I don&#x27;t wanna ads but I would pay for quality content&quot;. Now when outlets give you the option to pay &quot;It is too complicated to pay every single publisher&quot;. When publisher will join to enable a single payment solution system the excuse of the day will be &quot;Oh, this is too expensive...&quot;
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zipwitchover 9 years ago
Wired, and it&#x27;s multi-billionare owners can stuff it.<p>Wired has been on a long stead decline ever since it was first sold in the late 90s. Now they&#x27;ve gotten to the point where they do so little good journalism that just blacklisting them (to save myself the bother of running into their adblock block) will be as painless as cancelling my subscription was after their part in exposing Manning.
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Aissenover 9 years ago
I was about to whitelist the site (which I only visit occasionally), and as I approached the little uBlock Origin icon, I noticed the little supertext number: 28. I click on the icon: 28 requests blocked or 42% of the requests for the page. Thanks, but no thanks.<p>The absolute first thing one must do before asking people to whitelist is to reduce the ad footprint.
socket0over 9 years ago
&quot;Trust us, and everyone connected to us, and everyone connected to them.&quot;&quot;<p>Wired is asking its readership to compromise, without being willing to make any compromises themselves. They&#x27;re asking us to trust them on a one-to-one basis, but that&#x27;s now how trust works in a network. We have to trust Wired, and trust every single one of the companies or servers they include content and scripting from, and trust every single one of the companies or servers that these companies or servers include content from. We&#x27;re looking at trusting at least a hundred actors here, quite likely more.<p>&quot;Trust us, and only us.&quot;<p>A much better compromise would be to ask us to turn off ad blocking on their site, while in turn guaranteeing that every single script and asset served on their domain will also be served from their own servers, after having undergone at least some type of inspection. Then we at least have a reasonable basis for trust.
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aikahover 9 years ago
In France we had something called the Minitel, it was basically internet but the wrong way and centralized, you had to pay more or less depending on which website you would visit (you&#x27;d dial 36 14 for free content , 36 15 for paid one ... ), it failed because it was obviously the wrong model but it was quite lucrative for &quot;content providers&quot;. The phone company directly handled payement so there was no friction or paywall.<p>Here is how a terminal looked like :<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.element14.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;servlet&#x2F;JiveServlet&#x2F;showImage&#x2F;38-9977-113625&#x2F;minitel4.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.element14.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;servlet&#x2F;JiveServlet&#x2F;show...</a><p>I&#x27;m not suggesting to go back to that of course, it was dreadful, but it feels like current content providers always try to reinvent the Minitel somehow.
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msoadover 9 years ago
I wonder why content website don&#x27;t use Canvas rendering in order to block all ad-blockers. You either see the canvas, with ads in it or don&#x27;t see anything at all. There need to be a compatible ad-network as well. Accessibility is going to be an issue but if you can solve all of that there is a startup idea right there!
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inceptedover 9 years ago
Prediction: in a few days&#x2F;weeks, Wired will back pedal on this decision under the pretense that they are listening to the feedback of angry users, while the reality will be that they have been hemorrhaging readership because of the decision and reverting it is the only way to try to salvage the mess they created.
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gottamover 9 years ago
They&#x27;re very shortsighted. I only ever get to wired.com through things like links from HN so I&#x27;m not going to pay them money or disable my adblocker for the reasons they even list in their own article.<p>This means since I can&#x27;t view their articles, I definitely won&#x27;t be upvoting them on places like HN since I can&#x27;t read them, and I&#x27;m sure others are in the same boat.<p>They could have done this in so many other ways, but they chose the way that was openly hostile to their viewers. Good luck declaring war on your own readerbase, wired.
ChuckMcMover 9 years ago
Interesting, what I would like though is &quot;$1 a week on the weeks you read wired&quot; so lets say I start with a $52 budget, read some stories this week, my balance drops by $1, if I read nothing for a month, nothing happens, then I go back and read some stories it goes down $1 for that week. The when it gets below $10 it sends me an email suggesting I top up, and if it gets below $5 then every time I read a story it reminds me I only have &#x27;n&#x27; weeks left.<p>THAT is a system I would sign up for in a heart beat.
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funkysquidover 9 years ago
I don&#x27;t use an ad blocker, but I&#x27;m thinking of installing one just for wired, if only to see how they implement this. And because I don&#x27;t support hiding content from people who don&#x27;t want to pay with their eyeballs and privacy, or maybe can&#x27;t pay with money.
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SCdFover 9 years ago
&gt; here at WIRED, where we do all we can to write vital stories<p>I genuinely read &quot;viral stories&quot; the first time I read that sentence, and thought to myself: that&#x27;s awfully honest of them.<p>Speaking more seriously, I&#x27;ll repeat what I&#x27;ve said before: I have only started blocking ads in the past 6 months or so, because while in the past I would simply not visit websites with obnoxious advertisements, there is now nowhere to go.<p>And I understand that you need money to pay your staff, and I understand that the public is not paying you, so someone has to, so that naturally falls to advertisers, as it has done for a hundred years. But clearly the public isn&#x27;t going to let you do that, at least not traditionally.<p>So I don&#x27;t know where this is going to end up, but no where good I imagine. More paid promotions, more &quot;native&quot; advertising, more catering to people who haven&#x27;t worked out how to use ad block, more viral &quot;you&#x27;ll never guess who farted in the senate&quot; style non-content-- the top two articles right now on Wired are literally reporting about advertisements. There is advertising sponsoring them writing about advertisements. My head is spinning.
czepover 9 years ago
Now that sites are being more aggressive when detecting ad blockers, but they still want search engines to index the site and so they happily serve content to the crawlers... Would it be possible to write a browser plugin that can let your session masquerade as a robot? Even pay walled sites let Google index their content, that&#x27;s how they lure unsuspecting chumps to the site. So why couldn&#x27;t we have a plugin to imitate a robot, getting the content and by having to suffer through several megabytes of ad network code?
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simonswords82over 9 years ago
Respect to Wired for attempting to find a solution to their issues but I fear like many others commenting on this thread that this isn&#x27;t the solution.<p>I&#x27;d love to see their numbers in a few months - but I doubt that they would make them public.<p>Obviously making money via adverts on news websites is a shrinking business. I wonder if any companies are taking advantage of this to create a new type of revenue generation machine for publishers? I know micro-payments keep getting kicked around but they don&#x27;t seem like the solution here. Any thoughts?
a3nover 9 years ago
Good. I&#x27;ve been waiting for sites to stop whining, grow a pair and refuse me and my fellow blockers. I can get along without them, the quality of my life won&#x27;t suffer a single decimal place, and they&#x27;ll gain ... well, I don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;ll gain other than &quot;winning,&quot; but whatever.<p>But I guess one thing to consider is, even if I block, people who I send links to may or may not block. There&#x27;s some math that probably needs to be worked through.
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franciscopover 9 years ago
Let me take another view on this. Adblocking <i>is</i> on the rise according to, basically, everywhere. I&#x27;ve installed it recently in my family computers since it&#x27;ll protect them from many nasty stuff besides the ads. However, they are surely not able to add any site to the whitelist (they just know they don&#x27;t get advertising).<p>Furthermore, with population aging, I think that for the next 10-30 this will make the adoption even stronger. So let&#x27;s say that it keeps going on until most of the people use some adblock. What is the situation then? Let&#x27;s explore one option:<p>No one sees advertising&#x2F;tracking on the web. Newspapers, magazines and others have either adapted or died. So, for Wire&#x27;s example, allowing for an ad-sponsored site makes no sense since most of the people use adblocking so there&#x27;s not much public left. Now I don&#x27;t know anything about paid online magazine, but I&#x27;ve read that their numbers are not so great.<p>So who&#x27;s left?<p>- Websites that do it for free to scratch an itch such as codinghorror and Joel on Software.<p>- Corporate blogs that act like news press to improve the brand. This could include Tesla&#x27;s blog, SpaceX&#x27;s news, etc.<p>- Blogs that make it a content strategy so you buy their product such as GrooveHQ.<p>- Personal or professional review sites with referral links.<p>This is arguably a stronger change than when printed papers went online or when they went mobile, since their business model remained unchanged. It&#x27;s a change of business model, so they will have to adapt somehow.
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jayarcanumover 9 years ago
It&#x27;s funny to see amongst all the stock market rout how companies that are (now) subservient to the markets have to react to a down market caused by other bullshit than journalism. The lesson here is Wired, stay true, don&#x27;t fucking sell to Conde Nast and remain TRULY independent like real journalists should so you don&#x27;t have to fucking suck dick for money when the big old bullshit tech bubble starts to burst.
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lutuspover 9 years ago
&gt; So, in the coming weeks, we will restrict access to articles on WIRED.com if you are using an ad blocker.<p>Suit yourself. Goodbye, Wired, and welcome to reality.
ddxvover 9 years ago
I unblocked Wired a few months ago, eventually turned it back on because their popup video ads were so annoying, especially when travelling (slow connections) or on small touch devices.<p>Also, I just left that article to leave a comment here, since there is no comment section on that article, something else that drives me away from Wired.
pargonover 9 years ago
Cue all the people who say &quot;Fine, then I won&#x27;t ever go to Wired&#x27;s site again.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s kind of the point, you know.
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kbartover 9 years ago
I wish some company, that could make a difference, pushed for a paper-like ad service -- no tracking, no sounds&amp;video, no JS, just an old school text and picture ad. Such service I would gladly whitelist, but at the current state of advertisement industry whitelisting <i>any</i> site is a no-no.
makeitsucklessover 9 years ago
If only publishers had put that much thought and effort in sneaking in increasingly bloated advertising in with http requests for <i>content</i> until the ratio ads&#x2F;content was a 100&#x2F;1, or in massively violating their readers privacy and becoming complicit in a world wide greed driven surveillance system.<p>Any ethical policy with regards to ad blocking should start with the word &quot;sorry&quot;, followed by a lengthy apology for two decades of utterly unethical business strategies.<p>Instead, we just get another aggressively anti-consumer move in the privacy arms race.<p>No tracking if you pay up amounts to blackmail. Publishers like these won&#x27;t get a penny from me until they apologize and give up tracking altogether. (Of course the fact that Wired hasn&#x27;t been relevant since the late 90s makes this particular decision a lot easier...)
ameliusover 9 years ago
Time for adblockers to become smarter. IMHO, an adblocker should keep a shadow DOM, so that the originating site cannot see which DOM elements have been removed&#x2F;altered. Also, an adblocker could use a &quot;refresh cookie&quot; strategy, to effectively disable tracking.
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merbover 9 years ago
Soon we will need to pay for every site we visit. That&#x27;s aweful. I mean I have nothing against ads, when they are like the Google Ads, and I have nothing against not running a adblocker, when your site doesn&#x27;t do 100-200 requests for a simple site with text.
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kybernetykover 9 years ago
&gt;On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads<p>Only 20% is pretty low for a tech-savvy audience. I&#x27;m surprised as I assumed ad blockers were more wide spread amongst us &quot;computer people&quot;.
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S_A_Pover 9 years ago
Other comments have mentioned or hinted at this, but I think the only way to reduce the friction of online subscriptions is to &quot;pool&quot; the content a&#x27;la spotify or apple music. I would pay some amount per month for an all I can read premium content model just like I pay for music streaming. Having multiple magazines&#x2F;providers to choose from would be a big draw for me as I am not always interested in the content of one provider. I like Wired and have read their articles on occasion. I even have a subscription to the print version that I got for airline points I couldnt use elsewhere. I cant see any other way for me to make the jump.
kalziumover 9 years ago
Mh, I&#x27;d rather much prefer a system like Flattr (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flattr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flattr.com&#x2F;</a>). I used to read Wired a lot, but I somehow had the feeling that there has been a significant decline in the quality of the articles (used to have a subscription), so these days I can&#x27;t be bothered much.<p>That&#x27;s why I&#x27;d love something like a &quot;pay per like&quot; system, which let&#x27;s me support the quality content I enjoy and boost the people behind it. But I guess it wouldn&#x27;t really work out as most people are cheap and lazy - you&#x27;d need to sign up for a new service etc.. :&#x2F;
exodustover 9 years ago
For argument&#x27;s sake, imagine there were 1,000 people using adblock on Wired.com. They read 10 articles per week, some of which they actually enjoy.<p>Suddenly, they disable their adblockers.<p>Now, how much weekly ad revenue does Wired earn from those 1,000 visitors? There&#x27;s no way it&#x27;s $1,000 worth of ad revenue.<p>In which case, you could be forgiven for thinking this move by Wired is not about solving the website adblock problem, but more a subscription drive.<p>As an occasional reader I want a better deal on the subscription. Say, 20 cents per week. Apply a quota, cap my plan, all good. But $1 per week is not happening, and whitelisting the site is not happening. That&#x27;s just me.
jbclementsover 9 years ago
I geniunely do feel bad for magazines that are trying to figure out how to survive in a world of ad-blockers. I suspect that many hard-working journalists will lose their jobs as magazines like Wired go out of business. I personally subscribe to several newspapers, and I worry about them, too, and what&#x27;s going to happen to journalism in this country (USA, sorry for my chauvinism).<p>BUT!<p>I want to KILL the free internet--that is, the internet that is paid for with slices of my attention and life. I do believe that advertisers are very good at extracting my attention and money, and I genuinely do want to destroy that internet model. What will emerge? I can only cross my fingers.
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yoz-yover 9 years ago
Hm, I wonder what will this do to their advertising revenue. People who are ready to shell out money for subscription are probably those who were most likely follow the ads as well (as in, they are ready to part with their dough)
NamTafover 9 years ago
I subscribed to their iPad magazine publication for the last several years in an effort to support them. That weighs in at USD$25&#x2F;year off memory (NB: non-US subscribers get screwed for print delivery), which I felt was fair given I minimially read the magazine itself and just browse their site sometimes, e.g. when an article is linked from here or I see one on Twitter.<p>I would&#x27;ve hoped there would be some acknowledgement for their magazine subscribers, both digital and print. Certainly for print, which costs significantly more, but even for magazine subscribers who&#x27;ve been around for a number of years.
sroerickover 9 years ago
&gt; No tracking<p>Isn&#x27;t having an account a form of tracking?
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inanutshellusover 9 years ago
I love the current ad-based world that lets me get free access to premium content in exchange for ad views, I just don&#x27;t want to be profiled.<p>I&#x27;d be SUPER happy to see ads that support a site that didn&#x27;t track me.
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EugeneOZover 9 years ago
-20% of people who could share their content in social networks. Ok, who cares.
bsderover 9 years ago
Everybody was happy to outsource ads.<p>Then the ads got sufficiently obnoxious that everybody started wiping them out.<p>The solution is to insource your ads again and take responsibility. Then people would quit wiping them out.<p>But, that will cut into somebody rich dude&#x27;s profits, and they&#x27;ll have to ... ewwwww ... employ somebody.<p>Or, they can lose completely and go out of business. Their call.<p>I don&#x27;t link or read Forbes articles anymore. Cool by me.<p>Next up, the aggregators will start ripping the content that isn&#x27;t strongly paywalled and republishing it. Probably without attribution. Good luck.
zevroxover 9 years ago
Here is my scholarly response to this article.<p>Title: How zevrox is going to handle Wired going to handle Ad Blocking<p>Body: Zevrox will never visit Wired.com and their whiny princess ass again.
DanielBMarkhamover 9 years ago
On Facebook, my feed is full of thousands of amateur writers trying to interest me with cats, jokes, rants, and family pictures. They also do news, politics, religion, and anything else they think will get attention (including like-begging)<p>On Wired, I got what? 100 folks all doing the same thing only with more taste and style?<p>I get the fact that Wired, on average, is better consumable content than Facebook, but hell, Facebook is <i>free</i>. The rest of the net is <i>free</i>.<p>I do not have an answer for the Wired guys, but I gotta admit it&#x27;s sad&#x2F;funny that Facebook and Google are such close partners with so many content providers. They&#x27;re the guys driving the bus that&#x27;s taking you over the cliff.<p>For the record, I own the device or app that consumes my content over the net. If I choose to own a device or app that only displays text, or only displays text from certain domains? That&#x27;s my business, not yours. You can certainly turn the spigot off or on, and perhaps you&#x27;ll get me to pay for you turning it on, but that&#x27;s the limit of our interaction on this matter. What kind of device I use or whether or not I see certain things you want me to see is none of your freaking business.<p>In addition, as far as I&#x27;m concerned, any information I provide back to the server about what kind of browser I&#x27;m using is highly provisional and subject to change without notice. It is a courtesy that I provide anything.<p>It continues to amaze me that people who are in the business of providing entertainment somehow feel that it&#x27;s a good thing to go to war with the people they are entertaining. For the life of me I just don&#x27;t get how that makes any sense.<p>One day somebody is going to write a &quot;meta browser&quot;, a browser that opens up other browsers in invisible windows and surfs the web, then sucks out filtered content for the user to consume. (There would be a provision for faking out credentials, spoofing the signature, resetting the cookies, signing up under assumed&#x2F;real names, and so forth) Once that day comes, both the browser vendors an the content providers are going to be unhappy. But that&#x27;s where we&#x27;re headed if this radar vs. radar detector battle continues forward. Content consumers will win. They always do. (I imagine we&#x27;re going to see a big push for legislative relief here. Prepare yourselves.)
alkonautover 9 years ago
Again: just serve ads and I&#x27;m happy even if it&#x27;s half the content on the page. Just don&#x27;t use tracking ads from ad networks. I don&#x27;t mind downloading huge ads and I don&#x27;t mind the layout including the ads (as long as they are tasteful, as in the print version of Wired).<p>Wired is a print mag. They have always struck deals with advertisers to show dumb ads without impression counts, in their magazine. Just put those ads on the site!
uberwebover 9 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reek&#x2F;anti-adblock-killer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;reek&#x2F;anti-adblock-killer</a>
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mstadeover 9 years ago
&gt; You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week, you will get complete access to our content, with no display advertising or ad tracking.<p>I wish more places would do this. I subscribe to several news outlets, and none of them provide this option, even for paying customers. It&#x27;s ridiculous.<p>Unfortunately for Wired, their content just isn&#x27;t good enough to warrant the $52&#x2F;year price point.
Phemistover 9 years ago
This is the main reason why I use an Ad blocker (and tracker blocker, etc.)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;why-its-ok-to-block-ads&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;why-its-ok-to-b...</a><p>These arguments are not even acknowledged by Wired (or any other service that relies on ads)
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joeevans1000over 9 years ago
Dear Wired: just sell ads and place them on your page. I&#x27;ll have no problem with them. Don&#x27;t have services track me as I view them. Don&#x27;t have companies correlate my viewing of them with more data about me and then sell that data to yet more companies. It&#x27;s simple really.
tn13over 9 years ago
All these publications must for a consortium of sort where I can login into one website and manage all my subscription and then never ever see any advertisements.<p>I don&#x27;t want to pay wired and forbes and WaPo and NYT and keep track of all these payments appearing on my credit card. We need a Netflix for web publishers.
kipropingover 9 years ago
The best&#x2F;funniest solution for problems like these is showing cats and dogs with a Nickolas Cage face, instead of ads for those who have ad-blockers. There is a site that uses this technique,(8muses .com NSFW), those images are so distracting you just have to disable ads. It&#x27;s hilarious.
pmontraover 9 years ago
I&#x27;m using Adblock Plus local proxy on my unrooted Android tablet. I clicked the link and got a completely white page. I copied the link in Google Translate and I could read the page (clicked the button for the original version).<p>I understand that Wired has to pay its staff but it&#x27;s a uphill battle.
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Shivetyaover 9 years ago
so the end result will be when servers get powerful enough they will simply bake the ads into the article so at least the visual representation is there and rotation continues.<p>As for the content charges, a micro transaction system really needs to take root for the web. I really don&#x27;t want to be driven to the poor house with a dearth of monthlies. Its bad enough with cable, tv, netflix, etc&#x2F;etc, and now every damn website. Worse are magazine based companies trying to charge print subscribers for web content that used to be free.<p>A dollar a week might not sound like much but if I am not using the site each week its too much. Set me up an article bank so that my one dollar gets me a set number of articles and it tracks which I read so I can reread content I paid for
majewskyover 9 years ago
&quot;You can simply add WIRED.com to your ad blocker’s whitelist, so you view ads.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s cute. I just rolled out network-level adblocking at home to improve the security of legacy clients (e.g. old un-updateable Android phones). There is no concept of a whitelist in this approach.
fapjacksover 9 years ago
Welp. Fuck off, Wired. See ya! And that&#x27;s <i>exactly</i> what people say when this happens.
FrankenPCover 9 years ago
I don&#x27;t get it. Why is it no one has invented a safe JVM for ad execution so the site believes they are executing even though nothing is actually getting through? Is the coding required just too insane to handle?
pc86over 9 years ago
&gt; <i>we do all we can to write vital stories for an audience that’s passionate about the ongoing adventure of our rapidly changing world</i><p>Can&#x27;t even finish the first paragraph before the bullshit starts flowing.
dalanmillerover 9 years ago
They missed a big opportunity by not just linking the $1 ad-free sign up page.
JulianMorrisonover 9 years ago
Nope. If I can&#x27;t load your article WITHOUT ADVERTS then I simply will move along. I don&#x27;t care enough about any one news source to subject myself to hostile brain hacking attempts.
fiatmoneyover 9 years ago
If there&#x27;s an arms race between ad-blockers and ad-blocker-detectors, the latter will win. All of the money and incentives are set up for them to do a better job.
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dandareover 9 years ago
My single visit to read one of their articles generates way less that $1, I am not sure how much but I guess about $0.01. So, why micropayments never took off?
lawnpuppiesover 9 years ago
There&#x27;s a growing trend of trying to nickle and dime the internet. That adds up fast. It&#x27;s not a sustainable model in the long run.
rbcgerardover 9 years ago
It would be one thing if they were just talking about a static image advertisement, but we are talking about a whole lot more than that...
waylandsmithersover 9 years ago
So, all going according to plan for Apple right? The best free experience reading Wired is now through the iOS News app.
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wnevetsover 9 years ago
how is adblock detection different from other forms of client side DRM? At the end of the day you have to trust the client
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jonawesomegreenover 9 years ago
I think its going to be interesting as the anti-adblocker verses anti-anti-adblocker war heats up.
sanatgersappaover 9 years ago
Wonder if they&#x27;ve considered Instant Articles. Loads instantly for users and has ads as well.
piyushc1987over 9 years ago
It seems like we won&#x27;t be able to access anything without ads or without fees in future.
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gcb0over 9 years ago
the only way out is to get quality content out as much as possible. &quot;portals&quot; like yahoo have tons more of access than weird. they can easily dilute the ad blockers, pay the content creators a cut, and everybody ends up happy
unexistanceover 9 years ago
ah nope, they still do the floating horizontal bar, eating the PRECIOUS vertical screen-estate<p>ah well, we&#x27;ll see how it goes, nothing uBlock Origin can&#x27;t handle :D<p>p&#x2F;s: does anyone from Wired is here? to at least read &#x2F; respond?
asgfoiover 9 years ago
Here goes another one:<p><pre><code> echo 127.0.0.1 www.wired.com &gt;&gt; hosts</code></pre>
inaudibleover 9 years ago
I&#x27;m a bit shocked that Conde Nast never bothered to work out a digital advertising strategy that worked. In the magazine business they can sell off their pages easily because they are essentially part of the content and their content is influential. They control the client pool and match advertisers with the brand of content, a reader of Vogue would spend as much time studying the content of some advertisers because it covered their interests in an interesting way.<p>A good friend is a fashion designer and she collects oodles of high end magazines, they have a heavy cover price and advertising makes up a large proportion of the pages, but it doesn&#x27;t matter because the content and advertising coalesce. The advertising editor is still an important part of the business and they make certain that their work both reinforces the business and doesn&#x27;t tarnish the content. It&#x27;s a slick alignment.<p>Something became unstuck with publishing on the web very early, and for whatever the reason, magazines and periodicals typically gave up exclusively collating and editing their own advertising material. An industry of third party providers took that job, providing the initial promise of instant revenue and later the promise that adverts could be tailored to the eyeballs of the viewer. But the third parties never came up with a way to nicely separate their ads from the content that people were attracted to, to give it the necessary space that makes reading a magazine somehow less bombarding. They adopted the messy format of banners and placement ads, which wasn&#x27;t far away from the newspaper grid. But newspapers were always a different beast with less refinement, the daily coverage was enough of a compulsion to readers that it covered the incongruous layout (and the trend for a very long time was not to pollute the front page with advertising as this would cheapen the status of important stories and editorials - this came much later). Every ad technology that they have come up with only aides in their own destruction - popups, overlays, flash and animated gifs only serve in distracting the audience enough to irritate.<p>It&#x27;s probably too late to reform the industry to make advertising consistent, relevant and non distracting. The content has already suffered, reputations are diminished and reputable journalists are becoming far more autonomous in their output. There was a renewed interest in digital magazine publishing when the ipad came out, it allowed for more traditional interaction, layout and perusal, but releasing an app based publication is more involved than publishing to the web once and there&#x27;s more mind share in the latter.<p>It&#x27;s going to be interesting to watch how the web trends for commercial media. But at the same time I doubt my fashion friend is about to stop buying magazines and judging by the content they are becoming more beautiful and textural with every new publication. Still a viable niche alternative to screen burn, the adverts look fantastic, and there&#x27;s zero chance of accidental malware. No salvation for a suffering industry, but they&#x27;ve been embedded in the web a very long time and failed pretty badly.
uptownJimmyover 9 years ago
Goodbye, Wired. Good luck with all that.
smegelover 9 years ago
&gt; You can subscribe to a brand-new Ad-Free version of WIRED.com. For $1 a week<p>Wow, a paywall. Did you come up with that idea all by yourself?
iolothebardover 9 years ago
Arrivederci.
bobby_9xover 9 years ago
I&#x27;m fine with some people using Ad-block because they don&#x27;t like ads. But, when it&#x27;s automatically installed on masses of computers, it starts to really become a problem.<p>This will only create a fractured Internet and make it difficult for small startups to survive.