The Guardian’s Charles Arthur has added his thoughts to the ad blocking debate.
News websites’ relationship with readers could be portrayed as an activity akin to herding sheep: that you get a lot of people to come to your site, they read (or listen to, or watch) the content, and they also see adverts that advertisers pay to place.
But when the readers use “ad-blocking” software to filter out adverts – meaning the ads are never served to the page, thus pushing down the money that the site receives from advertisers – the game becomes more like cat-and-mouse. Faced with a small but significant number of people who are happy to have your content but not happy to have the adverts that fund it, what is the site to do?
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