When AdBlock Attacks Your Revenues
We are close to our general elections again. This is the time when several news platforms publish surveys about who’d elect whom on a weekly basis. Next to such articles, there are news stories that tend to be a little more controversial and tend to spark the reader’s attention.
You click on them and after a few lines you see a pop up asking you to subscribe to a premium service “for only a few Euros” of that platform. Bild Plus, Welt+, SZ Plus, they all try to make you pay for more articles. Some other news sources have implemented another model even longer: If the reader has read a specific number of articles online, they’re asked to buy the physical copy instead or wait 24 hours to read more articles. Often, before introducing the subscription model, platforms even combined adverts and limited numbers of articles per 24 hours.
The greedy press?
When I first heard of the plans about Bild Plus, my first thought was that they must have lost it. Aren’t these people making enough money? But later on it began dawning on me: How would they?
With the sales on paper press receding and adblockers making it harder for the platforms to cover their server costs, using a subscription model is one of the easier ways to cover the income and to cover the server costs at least. Even trying to force the reader to buy a physical copy by restricting the online reader’s access was easy to circumvent. Either you delete and block specific cookies that keep track for you or you go the even easier way and enter the URL of the next news site. The money from these relatively new subsriptions can be used to pay journalists and staff in charge for the webpages on a regular basis.
Personally, I don’t know which of the systems is the preferrable one. Restricting access to some articles is not what we should go for, however, annoying advertisements can be a reason to switch news platforms, if not even news networks again. Maybe the subscription model is not bad afterall if the blocked articles are not essential — and as long as we can get news from other sources as well.
