Sites that prevent ad blockers lose readers
It’s no secret that publishers despise ad blocker add-ons in web browsers. It is, after all, costing them revenue, and they have a right to make money. But there are different ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and one method isn’t working out very well.
Some sites, such as our sister site Computerworld.com, will pop up a window politely asking you to disable the ad blocker and then let you continue on to the content. Others, however, flat out lock you out of the content until the ad blocker is disabled. And those sites are losing traffic. The question is how much of that loss can be attributed to the ad blocker blockade.
The U.K. tech news site The Stack has looked at several sites that shut you out if an ad blocker is enabled, and it found virtually all of them are losing readers at a steady rate. It looked at both U.S. and European publishers, such as German publisher Axel Springer, publisher of the popular Bild newspaper and website, City AM financial news, Forbes and Wired. All of those sites denied users access to content until they whitelisted the site or disabled their ad blocker.
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