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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

In all cases the warnings presented to the user instructed them to whitelist the site in their adblocker – or go away.

And the answer from the visitors seems to be clear: we'll go away.

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I see very few articles that are covering exclusive content. Most of the time, the topic is also covered on non-blocked sites. I typically find more/better information from commentary on articles from places like HN, than in the article. It's a supply & demand problem: There are too many non-blocking sites and discussions, that ignoring the blocking one is trivial.

The internet interprets adblocker-rejection as censorship as damage, and routes around it.

They may well not give a damn.

Hell, they might be happy.

If traffic numbers are down and ad revenue is stable- guess what, lower operating costs & higher margin.

Are scalable web hosting costs really a significant portion of the operating costs of most news publishers with websites?

Additionally, losing visitors means losing the links they share on social media, so ad revenue may not be stable either (assuming adblocking users' links are visited by non-adblocking users.)

looking at some numbers people are starting to wisen up and chances of getting viral are diminishing as the average viewer's immune system reacts to clickbaits.

as they learn views are money and share are worthwhile, they start thinking twice before sharing and liking. growing an audience today is already insanely harder than compared 5 years ago and the situation looks like it's only gonna get worse.

> If traffic numbers are down and ad revenue is stable- guess what, lower operating costs & higher margin.

Guess what ad-block users also share articles with their friends that might not use ad-blockers ... I doubt blocking people with ad-blockers will help these sites on the long run.

That's probably how they think. But that is a mistake, nearly all the media I costume is as a result of a link on Facebook, reddit or Twitter that somebody has shared. It isn't important if the original poster has seen the ads, but whether how many people follow it.

good points. Less bandwidth, same subscriber rates could equal cheaper operating costs easily. very good point

They deserve to suffer if they are happy about this because it means their management is dumb. You have to look at this from a long term perspective. Thinking "oh that's great, we're more efficient now that we cut out all ad-blockers" is the stupidest thing you can do because you're not looking at the full picture and just lying to yourself that your company is fine. The reason why people go away when presented with these interstitial pages is because these sites don't have reputation to provide anything 'exclusive'. Just like how people don't care whether they saw the latest cat gif meme on Buzzfeed or Upworthy, people don't care where they saw some article about something that's probably one google search away. If they keep thinking "lower operating costs and higher margin so we're fine", it will only become worse and worse since there's increasingly more content online. Instead they should build a brand--the feeling of exclusivity. For example people go to New York Times because they know they won't be presented with bullshit (let's not argue about whether this is true or not. I'm simply stating that people expect to find what they need to know on NYT and not some random cat meme or clickbait) That's why people go to NYT. Compare that to sites like Forbes, which has become a complete bullshit. I remember there were days when Forbes was considered one of the more prestigious outlets. Not anymore. In my opinion they've turned themselves into a garbage that tries to squeeze out as much revenue as possible from whatever little traffic they have, and as a consequence treat readers like shit. When someone asks me to rate which site I prefer in terms of publisher ethics, I would pick Buzzfeed over Forbes. That's why when I'm presented with one of those "whitelist us or GTFO", I gladly say "yeah i'm happy to GTFO". They don't provide anything of exclusive quality. They treat readers like shit. AND on top of that they are condescending enough to say "we don't need you"? I'm happy to comply.

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