A focus still on the desktop

Though mobile adblockers may well prove to be a significant issue for news organizations in months or years to come, the outlets we spoke with are still focused primarily on desktop. They’re examining their options to circumvent adblockers, discourage readers from using them, or even prevent users from seeing content with adblockers turned on.

Salon: An unsatisfying history with selling an ad-free site

Salon is taking a light-handed approach. The site has seen only a slight uptick in adblocker usage in the past few months, Hagen said, though she wouldn’t divulge exact percentages. She hypothesized that the recent focus on adblockers may have attracted some new users, and said “we do think about it and worry about it, and it is our intention to operate around it.”

The company is in talks with some content recommendation engines that are whitelisted by major adblockers like AdBlock Plus. “It’s a way for us to try and recover some of that lost revenue from the ad-blocked pageviews,” she said. “Instead of injecting the more unsightly banner ads, they inject content recommendations, which a lot of times are just sponsored content,” she said. “We are experimenting with those and hope to introduce those as a way to navigate around our readers’ wishes, which is not to see the banner ads…We’re trying to carefully navigate around that and be respectful of our readers wishes.”

Founded in 1995, Salon was one of the first web-only publishers, but by the dot-com collapse, it had realized that advertising alone would make supporting the site a struggle. So in 2001, it introduced a subscription product, Salon Premium. For $30 annually, users could support the site while also accessing an ad-free version of it. “The new wave of Web ads that are now being adopted by many sites, including Salon, will be bigger and more prominent than current banner ads,” then-editor David Talbot wrote while introducing the program.

Salon Premium peaked in 2004 with 89,100 subscribers. But by 2013, there were fewer than 8,000 remaining, and the company discontinued the program in 2014.

And while some outlets are turning to paid or membership programs to supplant lost advertising revenue, Hagen said that Salon took from its previous experience that the cost of setting up such a system isn’t worth it:

It was modestly successful for a number of years. It helped really carry Salon through some tough times, certainly during the bubble burst and all that. But it got to the point where there were a number of business reasons for doing it, but it all came down to what’s the amount work going into supporting this versus how much we’re taking in revenue wise. Once the ROI doesn’t balance out, it made sense to turn it off. It’s managing two different reader experiences, and it goes beyond taking in the money and keeping track of the cookies that you put for other option. It comes down to really there are two versions of the site, and once you attribute all the complexities around mobile and fragmentation, that becomes many, many more versions of the site that our technical team has to manage.

Slate: Betting on a gentle upsell to membership

Fellow 1990s-web veteran Slate, meanwhile, is using its membership program, Slate Plus, to try and convince readers to support the site in a way other than advertising. Users who visit with an adblocker get a friendly, but firm, popup prompt: “We noticed you’re using an adblocker. Support Slate’s journalism and help us reduce our dependence on advertising — join Slate Plus.” After beginning to study ad-blocking rates early in 2015, Slate first began nudging its adblocking denizens in late October, Slate’s director of product development, David Stern, said. (Slate decided it didn’t want to outright block users from reading content.)

The gentler ask is helping, Stern said: “The adblock membership signup prompt is responsible for about 10 percent of new memberships since we launched it.” For Slate, which launched Slate Plus in April 2014 and this summer signed up its 10,000th member, that’s a significant pickup rate.

Stern said the prompt — rather than something more nagging or outright blocking — better fits the tone they are trying to strike with Slate readers, namely: We’re a community here. Come join us. “We understand some folks in the industry are eager to go to war,” Stern said. “And at the same time, without condoning it, we understand the position of those installing adblockers. But for us at Slate, we’re asking, ‘Can we reduce the incentive to install?'”

Reducing the incentive to install means looking to provide better reader experience, and ultimately, serve fewer ads. “We’re improving page load time , removing intrusive ads, and working toward fewer ads, but for those that stay we want them to be more impactful,” Stern said. “We want the kinds of ads that people who read fashion magazines — that’s not me — but the kinds of ads that people say are part of the experience of reading the magazine.”

Stern declined to share the percent of visitors to Slate who have adblockers installed on desktop or mobile, but said they were “roughly in line with the rates in the industry.” Mobile adblocking did see a slight increase after the debut of adblockers in iOS 9, he said, but it’s not something he feels pressed about.

In June, editor-in-chief Julia Turner wrote to international readers to announce that Slate would be moving to a paywall model overseas. International readers would now receive only five articles for free per month before being asked to join Slate Unlimited at the same cost as Slate Plus — $5 per month or $50 per year. In her message, she expounded on the ad revenue-motivated reasons Slate was adopting this model:

Slate is an ad-supported business. The majority of our revenue comes from the ads you see around the site. The money advertisers give us to run these ads pays for the salaries of our writers, editors, designers, photo editors, and technologists. But there’s a problem: Our U.S.-based sales team sells primarily to domestic advertisers, many of whom only want to reach a domestic audience. This may sound provincial, but there are decent business reasons for it: Maybe the car company buying ads on our site doesn’t sell the model it’s advertising in your country. Or maybe the marketing strategy where you live is different. Whatever you think of the logic, the fact is inescapable: Many U.S. advertisers won’t pay us to reach readers outside of the United States.

Absent from this explanation is the fact that adblockers are more popular in many overseas markets than in the United States. So even if international ad impressions were of value to advertisers, there would still be a higher percentage who would still not be seeing them.

Currently, the anti-adblocking prompt only serves to Slate’s desktop users, which Stern said is keeping in Slate’s plans to further improve its mobile offerings.

“On mobile we have different options,” he said. “Even those running adblockers share our content. Some have multiple browsers, some with adblockers and some not. It’s not in our interest or theirs to harass them.” Instead, he said, they’ll end up investing more in mobile apps and distributed platforms, like Facebook’s Instant Articles.

City A.M.: Whitelist us or no content for you

While Slate users can still see content even if they’re using an adblocker,City A.M., the free business newspaper that is distributed in and around London, is one outlet that’s been experimenting with preventing readers from seeing content with adblockers turned on.

The paper’s entire business model — both in print and digitally — is built around ad sales. As people began paying more attention to adblocking earlier this year, the paper decided it wanted to see what percentage of its audience was blocking. Because it’s a business paper, City A.M.’s audience tends to be older and more affluent, Martin Ashplant, the paper’s digital and social media director said.

“[They] wouldn’t necessarily pass in the same category as your Vices, or your BuzzFeeds, or whoever has a very strong millennial audience,” Ashplant said. “We suspected that the adblocking side of things would be less than it would be on average elsewhere.”

City A.M. suspected about 10 percent of its audience was using adblockers. But when the paper started tracking the figures, they realized that about 20 percent of desktop page impressions had ads blocked on them.

“That’s 20 percent of revenue that we can’t be making on desktop,” Ashplant said. “From our perspective, and I’m sure it’s the same for a number of publishers, desktop is where most of the revenue comes from. That’s a big number. That’s something we can’t ignore, and it’s only going to get bigger.” According to the PageFair report, 20.3 percent of Internet users in the U.K. used an adblocker in the second quarter of 2015, an increase of 82 percent from a year earlier.

As a result, City A.M. decided to launch an experiment by preventing some readers who use adblockers from reading its stories. Starting in late October, desktop Firefox users with adblockers turned on were prevented from accessing City A.M. content — making it the first paper in the U.K. to make such a move. Users were presented with the first few paragraphs of the story and then a message asking them to turn off their adblocker (or whitelist the site).

“We are having trouble showing you adverts on this page, which may be a result of adblocker software being installed on your device,” the message reads. “As City A.M. relies on advertising to fund its journalism, please disable any adblockers from running on cityam.com, then reload the page to see the rest of this content.”

The test started small with only Firefox users, who make up about 8 percent of City A.M.’s desktop audience. (In the coming months, City A.M. plans to roll out the adblocking messages to other desktop browsers including Chrome, Safari, and more. Mobile is less of a priority for the paper because most of its readership is still on desktop and very little of its revenue actually comes from mobile, Ashplant said.)

The results? In the first month or so since City A.M. began showing users the message, the percentage of readers using adblockers on Firefox has dropped by a third, Ashplant said. And about one-quarter of users who see the adblocking message actually turn it off or whitelist.

City A.M. also hasn’t seen a noticeable change in its bounce rate because of the new message, Ashplant said. He reads that to mean that people who decide not to turn off their adblockers likely wouldn’t have stayed on the site beyond reading that one article.

“It almost feels like the people who feel that it’s worth having that value exchange, and it’s worth turning the adblocker off — because they do want to see the content and they do perceive that City A.M. has got content that’s worth turning the adblocker off for — they’re inclined to spend longer on the site,” he explained. “It’s almost as if they’ve made a conscious decision that it’s worth doing it, and then they go on to explore the site and click on more than one page.”