7 ms·

I can do without Forbes. The problem with saying "switch off adblocker or no article" is that so many people are using adblockers, that those websites face an

by m0nty 11y ago

I can do without Forbes. The problem with saying "switch off adblocker or no article" is that so many people are using adblockers, that those websites face an inevitable decline in influence if they continue that way. Because, despite what they say, it's not just about the money: it's the ability to influence the debate, whatever it might be. To have your editorials taken seriously and widely quoted. To make people listen. They're losing that ability, together with readers and revenue.

maxerickson 11y ago
Forbes started having rando bloggers post articles to part of their website a couple years ago. I guess they wouldn't have done that if they thought they were taken particularly seriously. One possibility is that they decided to get what they could out of the name while it was still worth anything.
- m0nty 11y ago
  So they've jumped the shark anyway? Kind of hard for me to judge, because all I ever get is a blank gray page when I try to look at their articles.
- paulpauper 11y ago
  Give that their articles are everywhere when you go a google search, I'm sure they are making wheelbarrows full of money, even if the 'brand' suffers a bit. Print magazines written by professionals have been in decline for while now. User-generated content of mediocre quality is where it is now. That is the business model that makes the most money
- ghaff 11y ago
  Back in the Malcolm Forbes days, Forbes was one of the big three US business magazines--the others being Fortune and Business Week--and it was quite good. It was my favorite of the three and I subscribed to it for a number of years. It started declining at some point after Malcolm's death and for the past few years in particular the online site has really sold its soul for clicks. Some of its bloggers are decent but a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another and/or are more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct. And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial.
  - smcnally 11y ago
    There are many more writers on Forbes now than 5 years ago. You might not like them all. They may not all be of the same, high caliber. None of them are "randos" as the parent comment noted; they all come in with a body of work and a reputation and are vetted by editors. > a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another That hadn't been the case. With hope, it's still not. There are ~disclosures linked from every byline. There are points of view and interests, to be sure. Those interests should be at least as transparent as they are for Fortune, Business Week, The New York Times, et al. > more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct Well-said. This has been the trajectory of news, entertainment, and the media in general for many decades. The web has helped accelerate it, but it's not proprietary to web publishers. > And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial That's by design and intended to be so in a positive way: "don't just pitch products at me, but give me information I'll find useful or entertaining even if it does suit your agenda." My disclosure is I worked on BrandVoice and similar programs; I'm no longer with Forbes. My strong opinion is all media have forms of this ad/edit line-blurring via product placement, advertorial, sponsorships, and combinations of them all. (more on that https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/you-call-e-t-a-movie-but-there-s-a-bag-of-reese-s-pieces-right-there-5d02b68ecd6f#.2dytgsug0 https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/you-call-e-t-a-movie-but-ther... ) re the parent post, advertorial is one way publishers are making some money and, in part, paying writers to bring you news and entertainment. It doesn't directly involve malware and usually not even ad networks. It's not intended to disrupt reading experiences -- like pop-ups, take-overs, & pre-roll -- and all the tools are there for advertisers to disclose conflicts and provide some thoughtfulness & value to people who engage with it. When that's not the case 100% of the time, it's about specific executions rather than corruption of the concept as a whole.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      So I went to Google, searched "Forbes", clicked "news" and then picked something I thought looked rando. Here's a personal finance/savvy consumer contributor that certainly isn't well known extolling lottery mysticism: http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessamcgrady/2016/01/08/powerball/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessamcgrady/2016/01/08/powerb... I agree that I totally cherry picked that example, at least, from the first 5 Google results.
paulpauper 11y ago
Probably the best way to defeat ad blockers is to make the ads as unobtrusive and un-annoying possible. Facebook seems to have succeeded at this . Mobile adverting may also be more resistant to ad blocking.
- leephillips 11y ago
  The limit is surreptitious product placement - the commercial corruption of the text. I run uBlock Origin myself, and agree that some kind of blocking is essential. But this seems an inevitable consequence - as product placement is being used in TV shows to counteract TIVO, etc.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  An ad-blocker doesn't care how "unobtrusive" or "un-annoying" your ad is. The sure-fire way to defeat an ad-blocker is to serve the ad from the same domain as the parent site. If they did that, ad-blockers would suddenly not work, and would have to become a lot more complicated to figure out which code is an ad and which is normal content. It's fairly easy these days because they outsource the ads to other domains, so the ad-blocker just has to block anything pointing to doubleclick.com and friends.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Adblockers have been blocking sections of HTML for years. Here's how to write such rules for Adblock Plus: https://adblockplus.org/filters#elemhide https://adblockplus.org/filters#elemhide There's even an extension you can install to create such rules by pointing and clicking on the offending section of the page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelpe...
    - Luyt 11y ago
      I think uBlock does this out of the box.
      - 11y ago
Grishnakh 11y ago
Are they though? Last I'd heard, it was still a minority of people using ad-blockers. Techies, sure, but most people are clueless, and only use ad-blockers when their techie spouses/relatives install them.
- narrowrail 11y ago
  If what you are saying is true, then why would Forbes force this "minority" to disable their adblocker in the first place? My understanding is that once Apple allowed this capability on iOS, it became more prevalent among the non-technical crowd.
  - Someone 11y ago
    The users with an easy to activate ad blocker recently bought a top of the market smartphone (or they have a relatively expensive subscription with a 'free' phone). That's a relatively small market segment, but the fraction of advertising revenues it brings in is quite a bit higher.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Probably because corporate executives are asshole control freaks, so even if it's only 23% (according to the other responder using Forbes' own quote), they get pissed off and want to "fix" that. Also, nearly a quarter of viewers using ad-blockers still amounts to a lot of "lost" ad revenue, even if it's still a minority. (Using scare-quotes since you're not losing something if you never had it, but corporate executives don't believe that; just ask the MPAA and RIAA.)
  - pixl97 11y ago
    >then why would Forbes force this "minority" to disable their adblocker in the first place? A minority can represent a majority of your profit.
  - DrScump 11y ago
    Those users who are savvy enough to use adblockers are part of the most-coveted demographics.

by m0nty 11y ago

maxerickson 11y ago

Forbes started having rando bloggers post articles to part of their website a couple years ago. I guess they wouldn't have done that if they thought they were taken particularly seriously. One possibility is that they decided to get what they could out of the name while it was still worth anything.

m0nty 11y ago
So they've jumped the shark anyway? Kind of hard for me to judge, because all I ever get is a blank gray page when I try to look at their articles.
paulpauper 11y ago
Give that their articles are everywhere when you go a google search, I'm sure they are making wheelbarrows full of money, even if the 'brand' suffers a bit. Print magazines written by professionals have been in decline for while now. User-generated content of mediocre quality is where it is now. That is the business model that makes the most money
ghaff 11y ago
Back in the Malcolm Forbes days, Forbes was one of the big three US business magazines--the others being Fortune and Business Week--and it was quite good. It was my favorite of the three and I subscribed to it for a number of years. It started declining at some point after Malcolm's death and for the past few years in particular the online site has really sold its soul for clicks. Some of its bloggers are decent but a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another and/or are more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct. And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial.
- smcnally 11y ago
  There are many more writers on Forbes now than 5 years ago. You might not like them all. They may not all be of the same, high caliber. None of them are "randos" as the parent comment noted; they all come in with a body of work and a reputation and are vetted by editors. > a lot of them have massive conflicts of interest of one sort or another That hadn't been the case. With hope, it's still not. There are ~disclosures linked from every byline. There are points of view and interests, to be sure. Those interests should be at least as transparent as they are for Fortune, Business Week, The New York Times, et al. > more interested in being provocative than being thoughtful or correct Well-said. This has been the trajectory of news, entertainment, and the media in general for many decades. The web has helped accelerate it, but it's not proprietary to web publishers. > And BrandVoice really blurs the lines between advertising and editorial That's by design and intended to be so in a positive way: "don't just pitch products at me, but give me information I'll find useful or entertaining even if it does suit your agenda." My disclosure is I worked on BrandVoice and similar programs; I'm no longer with Forbes. My strong opinion is all media have forms of this ad/edit line-blurring via product placement, advertorial, sponsorships, and combinations of them all. (more on that https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/you-call-e-t-a-movie-but-there-s-a-bag-of-reese-s-pieces-right-there-5d02b68ecd6f#.2dytgsug0 https://medium.com/@sjkmcnally/you-call-e-t-a-movie-but-ther... ) re the parent post, advertorial is one way publishers are making some money and, in part, paying writers to bring you news and entertainment. It doesn't directly involve malware and usually not even ad networks. It's not intended to disrupt reading experiences -- like pop-ups, take-overs, & pre-roll -- and all the tools are there for advertisers to disclose conflicts and provide some thoughtfulness & value to people who engage with it. When that's not the case 100% of the time, it's about specific executions rather than corruption of the concept as a whole.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    So I went to Google, searched "Forbes", clicked "news" and then picked something I thought looked rando. Here's a personal finance/savvy consumer contributor that certainly isn't well known extolling lottery mysticism: http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessamcgrady/2016/01/08/powerball/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/vanessamcgrady/2016/01/08/powerb... I agree that I totally cherry picked that example, at least, from the first 5 Google results.

paulpauper 11y ago

Probably the best way to defeat ad blockers is to make the ads as unobtrusive and un-annoying possible. Facebook seems to have succeeded at this . Mobile adverting may also be more resistant to ad blocking.

leephillips 11y ago
The limit is surreptitious product placement - the commercial corruption of the text. I run uBlock Origin myself, and agree that some kind of blocking is essential. But this seems an inevitable consequence - as product placement is being used in TV shows to counteract TIVO, etc.
Grishnakh 11y ago
An ad-blocker doesn't care how "unobtrusive" or "un-annoying" your ad is. The sure-fire way to defeat an ad-blocker is to serve the ad from the same domain as the parent site. If they did that, ad-blockers would suddenly not work, and would have to become a lot more complicated to figure out which code is an ad and which is normal content. It's fairly easy these days because they outsource the ads to other domains, so the ad-blocker just has to block anything pointing to doubleclick.com and friends.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Adblockers have been blocking sections of HTML for years. Here's how to write such rules for Adblock Plus: https://adblockplus.org/filters#elemhide https://adblockplus.org/filters#elemhide There's even an extension you can install to create such rules by pointing and clicking on the offending section of the page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelper/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/elemhidehelpe...
  - Luyt 11y ago
    I think uBlock does this out of the box.
    - 11y ago

Grishnakh 11y ago

Are they though? Last I'd heard, it was still a minority of people using ad-blockers. Techies, sure, but most people are clueless, and only use ad-blockers when their techie spouses/relatives install them.

narrowrail 11y ago
If what you are saying is true, then why would Forbes force this "minority" to disable their adblocker in the first place? My understanding is that once Apple allowed this capability on iOS, it became more prevalent among the non-technical crowd.
- Someone 11y ago
  The users with an easy to activate ad blocker recently bought a top of the market smartphone (or they have a relatively expensive subscription with a 'free' phone). That's a relatively small market segment, but the fraction of advertising revenues it brings in is quite a bit higher.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Probably because corporate executives are asshole control freaks, so even if it's only 23% (according to the other responder using Forbes' own quote), they get pissed off and want to "fix" that. Also, nearly a quarter of viewers using ad-blockers still amounts to a lot of "lost" ad revenue, even if it's still a minority. (Using scare-quotes since you're not losing something if you never had it, but corporate executives don't believe that; just ask the MPAA and RIAA.)
- pixl97 11y ago
  >then why would Forbes force this "minority" to disable their adblocker in the first place? A minority can represent a majority of your profit.
- DrScump 11y ago
  Those users who are savvy enough to use adblockers are part of the most-coveted demographics.