AD-BLOCKERS, TRACKERS, AND HOW READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO OBSTRUCT DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS’ REVENUES

Abstract

Online publications that use outdated web platforms still support themselves financially through old-fashioned ad promotion methods inserted into the web pages of press articles. While many readers harm the publications they read by blocking advertisements or using Read It Later technologies (in most browsers) or content curation and bookmarking tools (Pocket, Feedly, Instapaper), which involve the extraction of the text for "clean" reading formats or stripping the extra content from the site, the Romanian media landscape bursts with publications which do not fully understand the effects of blocking advertisements on the web and the impact on revenues from old forms of advertising such as pay per click, per view, per acquisition, or ad-words. Or, if they are doing it, they are exposing the users to some data privacy risks. In the first part of the article, we will try to outline how these technologies and applications offer readers a less distracted reading experience, as well as how much online advertising revenues on which newsrooms depend upon were affected. In the second part, we will try to illustrate the ways in which the media could convince the audience to abandon the blocking software or to propose and adopt, if they have not already done so, new financing models: reader revenue (by partial or full subscriptions) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) partnerships. The study contains a brief recording and analysis of the number of ads and online trackers present in the homepages and throughout the articles of 5 mainstream media publications and 4 unaffiliated publications, as reported by Ad-Blocker Plus and Disconnect Mozilla Firefox add-ons.