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Business News Media
City AM first UK newspaper to block the ad-blockers
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 21 October 2015
London business freesheet City AM has become the first UK newspaper to try to stop readers using ad-blockers from accessing its website.
Ad-blocking software – which filters out the ad content when you access a website – is nothing new of course, though it has been bothering media owners more of late, partly as online advertising income becomes ever more important, and partly because of increased use of such technology. There has also been much discussion about the ad-blocking tools becoming more prevalent on mobile devices.
City AM’s new experiment targets users of the Firefox browser on desktop machines. If ad-blocking software is detected, articles will be blurred out and readers will see a message that says: “We are having trouble showing you adverts on this page, which may be a result of ad blocker software being installed on your device. As City AM relies on advertising to fund its journalism, please disable any ad-blockers from running on cityam.com to see the rest of this content”. There will then be a help page explaining how to turn off the blocks.
The business paper follows the lead of German publisher Axel Springer which is now banning readers who are detected using ad-blockers from the website of its Bild paper. It’s also thought that Trinity Mirror is considering similar action on its websites over here.
Commenting on the experiment in blocking the ad-blockerers, Martin Ashplant, City AM’s Digital Director, told The Guardian: “We are of the view that City AM produces quality content which people value. As an ad-funded organisation, the ability to serve adverts around this content is crucial to us continuing to provide it for free to our users. We hope that by making it clear to people that ad blocking hurts our ability to do this they will choose to turn ad blockers off on cityam.com, even if they decide to continue using them elsewhere”.
It’s thought that, for most publications, only a small minority of readers are currently actively blocking the ads, though this number is increasing. Media owners presumably hope that restricting content access to people used ad-blockers will limit this growth, even if ad-blocking software evolves to avoid detection. Though newspaper and magazine publishers could also help by ensuring they don’t fill every web page with so many ad widgets that content takes forever to load.
