Bild: like it lump it?
German tabloid Bild has decided to prevent anybody using an adblocker from accessing its content, sending them to another page where it suggests uninstalling it or becoming a subscriber.
Bild’s site is a nightmare. It’s not so much that the sensationalist publication lives off advertising, so much as it seems determined to make life hell for anybody who visits the site. Advertisements are constantly making flanking maneuvers, while the bottom of the page, all kinds of intrusive formats, including that living relic, the pop-up. There is something decidedly sado-masochistic about reading Bild: there is no pleasure without pain.
Obviously, the publication is free to do what it likes with its content and like any good nightclub, reserves the right to refuse entry. Fine. But telling would-be readers: “We make our living from this, and without advertising we couldn’t pay our five hundred journalists” is simply another way of saying: “We haven’t a clue what’s going on.” One thing is to have a business mode, and something else entirely is to have no respect whatsoever for your clients and to assume you can subject them to torture while they read your content.
In some cases, it’s as though some newspapers have lost their minds during the transition from newspaper to screen formats: in the old days, advertising, because of the technical and physical limitations of paper knew its place. An advertisement never leapt off the page, or moved into the middle of it preventing us from reading an article, and much less did it shout at us. But for some incomprehensible reason, this Alice in Wonderland behavior is okay in a digital format.
Rather than using technology to bring advertisers closer to its target audience, what seems to have happened is a shift in thinking whereby impact is measured in terms of the most bother it can cause. Having been bothered a lot over the last few years, growing numbers of people are now taking advantage of technology to keep advertisements at arm’s length. And the only response to this by some publications is to say: “like it or lump it.” Somebody has got this very wrong, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the public.
If you want your readers to deactivate their adblockers, the first thing you’re going to have to do is to accept your many mistakes, swear never to repeat them and promise your readers that you won’t punish them for reading your content, that you won’t force them to download dozens of trackers of all kinds, that you won’t send ten bits of useless stuff for every bit of content they want to see. If you make your living from advertising, commit today to change for the better. If you want to pay your employees’ wages, then manage your business properly and don’t insult the intelligence of your readers. Otherwise, you’re simply showing the world that you haven’t a clue what’s going on.
Bild has been punishing its readers for years with these diabolical advertising formats, and is now setting itself up as some kind of beacon through the use of this “page of shame” to teach wayward readers a lesson. It should be ashamed of itself for having created the conditions (along with many other publications) that forced so many people to install adblockers in the first place. No Axel Springer: your analysis of the situation is defective: you are denying any responsibility for the situation we now find ourselves in and are simply ramping up the conflict. The best thing readers could do is to boycott Bild until you see sense.
(En español, aquí)
