Didn't you know? Disabling ad blockers ensures free speech and apparently may also peacefully end the current crisis in the middle east... oh, did I mention it helps with world hunger too?
If you disable the ad blocker, they'll send you some free Iranian yoghurt.
We are dedicated to safe and ethical advertising practices
Mates, that ship has long sailed
There are ethical ad services, but I've never seen outside of one random blog site.
Corporations are not people, therefore do not have a right to free speech.
Yeah, advertising is not "free speech." It's a way for corporations to steal your life from you, 60 seconds at a time
What's "safe and ethical advertising practices"? Is it like pacifist inclusive Nazism?
Our ethics dictate we charge the advertisers the highest possible amount so we get more freedom bucks from them
Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to be forced to consume something (including ads). Freedom of speech includes not sending all of my metadata to you and your business partners.
I wouldn't visit these sites if you paid me. Much less forced me to watch ads.
We believe in free speech, do you? Give us all your money and send us your nude to prove it.
Its a bad marketing campaign because it is easily turned into threads like this. Also, I have no idea if USA Today is good or not (I genuinely have never even thought about it).
But it is worth understanding. News outlets need to get funding from somewhere. Some are state funded and I should not need to explain why that introduces biases. Others take massive sponsorship deals from companies and ensure that John Oliver will always have something to talk about. And others run ads to varying degrees of curation.
The last option is subscriptions and those are few and far between.
Its more or less the same thing we saw with ads in general over the 00s. More and more people learned how to block ads so more and more websites needed to add obnoxious flash based ads and insane uses of javascript and so forth to get any impressions. And fewer and fewer "good" companies wanted to advertise to adblock heavy audiences which led to more and more trojans and so forth. Which leads to more and more ad blockers and...
In the case of news media? We mostly see this manifest as less investigative journalism and more listicles and "clickbait" articles because those at least get the facebook crowd to click.
Even though I'm probably not reading it enough to be worth it I pay a yearly only-subscription to one of the newspapers that gained my trust with good investigative pieces in the past.
If everyone was just consuming for free then a newspaper needs to either be heavily funded by a really wealthy person that pays them (and in turn makes it less likely that said newspaper will report against people like that) or the newspaper needs to sell ad-space. So if you are consuming for free AND blocking ads on a website then you are only costing that website money - and in case of newspapers that's not a good thing since it ensures that only those that are publicly funded or funded by billionaires will survive "almost unchanged" while the rest will try to get as populist as possible to the the most amount of clicks to increase their ad-revenue
