Newspapers escalate their fight against ad blockers - The Washington Post

Also see Rise of Ad-Blocking Software Threatens Online Revenue (NYT); tangentially, Forbes and Wired, both sites that until recently made their content unavailable to people using ad blockers, no longer do so (which is especially useful for readers of Wired, which at least in my experience routinely serves ads that stall Google Chrome)

"The complaint asks the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that oversees trade practices, to investigate ad blockers that offer “paid whitelisting,” – a service which charges advertisers to bypass ad-blocking software – along with services that substitute ad blockers’ own advertising for blocked ads or get around publishers’ subscription pages.

The NAA complaint comes at a moment when the newspaper industry continues to struggle with dramatic changes that have eroded its business. Advertising revenues have dropped from roughly $50 billion a decade ago to less than half of that today, according to the NAA. Revenues from print advertising continue to slip as readers consume more news online, and digital advertising brings in far less revenue than print."

Newspapers escalate their fight against ad blockers - The Washington Post