The Atlantic to Ad Blockers: Pay Up or Leave

Bye then! Plenty more fish in the sea.

I really don't understand what the increasing number of sites which demand I turn off my ad-blocker before viewing their ten-a-penny content hope to achieve:

1: 99,99999% of the time I'll just go and find the same content elsewhere. Let's face it, the vast majority of 'news' on the internet is rehashed from the same handful of news agency stories, or from press releases. Very few sites are offering truly original content.

2: That 0,00001% of the time when I will comply with your demands, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to click on any of the ads you're forcing me at [metaphorical!] gunpoint to download, anyway. Now it's a matter of principle, as you've made our 'relationship' antagonistic. You're now 'the man', telling me what to do.

So why bother? I really don't understand the thinking behind it.

The economics on these prices makes no sense for probably most of their traffic. $39.99 per year? Facebook's annualized 2015 revenue per user was $11.96, and they want more than 3x that on a subscription basis? Fat chance.

To the Atlantic: Stop invading my privacy and tracking what I read and do, or I won't look at your ads.

"The new prompt [to disable ad blocking] will appear on the Atlantic’s site Monday but will not take full effect until the site is finished transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS, [...] once complete, ad-blocking users will no longer be able to read content on the site without disabling their software or buying the new subscription."

I'm just really excited to see how on earth they plan to follow through with that vague threat. I don't believe I've ever seen an ad block plugin get successfully thwarted in a way the plugin couldn't just filter out itself.

I just realized that the ad-block I'm using doesn't even have a way to whitelist anything. (Ka-block on Safari.)

And this kind of behavior from websites is getting more and more common. computerworld, wired, etc...