{"id":5294,"date":"2015-11-21T15:15:16","date_gmt":"2015-11-21T14:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/?p=5294"},"modified":"2015-11-21T17:31:15","modified_gmt":"2015-11-21T16:31:15","slug":"no-news-bad-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/archives\/5294","title":{"rendered":"No news, bad news"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"guardian\"I was reading the news this morning, and I found this one: Yahoo restricting Mail accounts if it detects Ad-blockers<\/a>. Well, it’s understandable: my guess is that the second revenue stream for sites like Yahoo! or Google is advertising (the first one, by far, being our data), so I expected some kind of reaction to the raising popularity of Ad-blockers<\/a> (thanks to Apple recently allowing them on their mobile devices).<\/p>\n

But I found what The Guardian international<\/a> is doing about Ad-blockers much more interesting. A few days ago I installed a free one on my iPad, and the only website that seemed to notice was The Guardian’s. At first it showed me a footer saying something like: “We’ve noticed you’re using an Ad-blocker. Perhaps you’d like to support us in another way? We have a support subscription starting at 5 \u20ac”. I found this to be a tempting offer, as I can see their point: you read for free something that costs money to write, so we have to get this money back (and possibly make a profit) one way or another. (Side note: this is also why I’ve been against “free” browsers for years, but I’ve lost that battle: browsers are all free – also free to do what they want with our data.)<\/p>\n

While I was considering the Guardian’s offer, something else happened: a whole part of the Guardian’s page (the often interesting In Depth<\/em> section, with long reads) disappeared. For a few days I thought they were reshuffling their home page, but then I had an illumination: I disabled my Ad blocker, and the In Depth<\/em> section came back.<\/p>\n

Again, interesting approach: you can read the news for free (I mean without ads), but not the long reads. It makes sense in a funny, religious sort of way: the news are seen as a free “service”, while the longer reads are “fun” (or perhaps more expensive for the newspaper), and you should pay for that. Or, if you like, it’s the Porn solution: you get three minutes clips for free (perhaps serviceable, but hardly satisfactory), for longer content you gotta pay.<\/p>\n

But there’s something about this that bothers me. Over the years, I’ve come to trust the Guardian (although removing a whole section without saying it is not very classy), but I can imagine very different scenarios elsewhere*: advertising hard-coded into the news, articles sponsored by companies, or even entirely different news for Ad-blocker users. One thing is certain: we all need our news to be independent and possibly free. But to provide us with independent, free news costs money. Where should this money come from?<\/p>\n

* See also this very explicit piece by John Naughton (who blames Apple), also in the Guardian: The rise of ad-blocking could herald the end of the free internet<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was reading the news this morning, and I found this one: Yahoo restricting Mail accounts if it detects Ad-blockers. Well, it’s understandable: my guess is that the second revenue stream for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51,54],"tags":[216,215,125,214],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5294"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5308,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5294\/revisions\/5308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergiomessina.com\/fosforo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}