The Story Is…
So I like to see what’s happening on Bloomberg…
Bloomberg generally offers an interesting mix of low quality content, sad bitter gaping at young people, and actual business news. So I check Bloomberg’s website regularly.
Now it seems Bloomberg’s new ad-blocking policy and software is either overly aggressive or Bloomberg has purposely set it to display to everybody regardless of whether or not they have an adblocker… because boy oh boy is it a pain in the butt to get this message from them every single time I go to Bloomberg.
And the thing is… I don’t have an adblocker. I have never even used an ad blocker before. I was minding my own business… and this is how they treat me? I just wanted to read…
Why?
Why do they keep interrupting me with these pop ups?
Because Bloomberg doesn’t want people to use software that prevents them from delivering 7 ads per page? And un-muted auto play videos?? And stupid car advertisements???
How offensive is that…
All I wanted to do was read some articles and I’m being virtually harassed by Bloomberg because of something I didn’t even do. How is that treating users well? How does that get people to stay with your publication? How is that helping your users?
All I can infer is that this is Bloomberg demonstrating just how little they care for their users…
Because apparently not once did they stop and go “Maybe we should reduce the number of ads, maybe if we really need this extra revenue to support us we should get it another way, maybe our users and not our advertisers are the most important part of the equation”.
Nope.
It’s their users fault apparently…
We free-loading SOBs are taking the bread from their mouths apparently…
Now I could talk for hours about all the implications and stupidity surrounding Old Media’s response to ad-blockers… But that isn’t what this article is about. This article is just a simple real life demonstration of what Old Media’s stupid policies do to their users.
And all I’ll say is this… All that Bloomberg has done is further commit users to disengage and use ad-blockers. That’s all that they’re accomplishing.
Update – 06/05/2016
So now the ad blocker popup on Bloomberg displays on the desktop version of the site as well as the mobile… great.
Just… so… great…
Update – 06/06/2016
This is exactly what I was talking about… this is exactly why people want to use adblock.
It’s aggressive, unwanted, tactics like having an un-muted autoplay video that sticks to the sidebar as you scroll down that pisses people off so much.
Update – 06/11/2016
Someday, Bloomberg will grow up.
That day is not today.
Update – 06/16/2016
if consumer opt-out has been selected via http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices, the Bloomberg nag message seems to occur. Whitelisting can be done by deleting cookies and restarting browser, it seems. This worked for me, using a ChromeBit PC.
That’s interesting… I was using Chrome with the only custom setting being the ‘Do Not Track’ request turned on. From what I hear it doesn’t do much… except possibly make Bloomberg serve you popup nag messages.
Maybe their ‘ad blocker detection’ software is just incredibly dumb and displays a popup to any browser that has any kind of privacy features enabled.