Take a page from radio, stop allowing ads to kidnap journalism
Jul 5, 2016, 5:52 AM | Updated: 10:15 am
If you read a lot of news on the Internet you’ve noticed that more and more websites are now begging you to disable your ad blocker, with messages saying, “We see you’re using an ad blocker…” like you were some kind of shoplifter.
The message then goes on to explain that ads are the price of providing quality journalism, and if you really hate ads you can pay for a subscription.
Being in the media, I certainly understand. And yet I too use an ad blocker, and I’ll tell you why.
It’s not because I hate ads. I love ads. They’re a great way of providing free media. But ads should compete for your attention fair and square. Whereas a lot of web ads play dirty.
A lot of ads just kidnap your article and hold it hostage while you’re in the middle of reading it. Or they take forever to load while that circle goes round and round and you see the message: “Waiting for Doubleclick” in the status bar. It’s like sitting in a traffic jam at your desk, or like a newspaper gluing the ads over your article and making you peel them off.
And as a result, over the last year, the use of ad blockers worldwide has almost doubled.
Well if websites want that to change, there is a solution. Just make the ads load faster.
In radio, we’ve learned that lesson. If radio treated ads the way the web did, I’d say, “now this,” and there would be 10 seconds of silence while the ad loaded. But we don’t do it that way, and if websites want us to stop using ad blockers, they should stop using ads as story blockers. Have the ads ready to go.
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Tune in to KIRO Newsradio weekdays at 5am for Dave Ross on Seattle's Morning News.
