If you are an internet savvy person, then you will probably have the ad-blocker enabled on your browser. Mostly to get rid of the flashy banners and roll-over ads while catching up with the daily headlines from news websites and other sites over the internet.
Well, these new publishers have teamed up and started blocking out users with ad blockers enabled on their browsers. India’s top news publications like The Time of India, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, Dainik Bhaskar, India today and others have started blocking readers using ad-blockers from accessing their news content.
Users with ad-blocker extension enabled on their browser or software installed on their computer are now shown a message to disable the ad blocker while browsing this news website.
Blocking the ad-blockers by Indian new publishers would significantly impact Indian tech savvy users. As per PageFair report, India has the second-highest number of people using ad blockers. Around 122 million active users in India are using ad blockers to dealt with bad ads.
So why are they doing it? For several news websites advertising is their primary source of incomes. They argue that use of ad-blockers by users cut down their vital ad revenue. News publisher websites rely on advertising revenue to compensate the news articles produced by over a thousand of journalists across India and the world.
“Thanks for visiting The Times of India. You seem to have an Ad Blocker on. TimesofIndia.com provides news 24×7, produced by over 1,000 journalists across India and the world. To enable this, we have to rely on advertising revenue, which ad blockers stop. Please turn it off in order to continue” message shown to users using ad-blocker on ToI.
But ad-blocking advocates have their side of the story too, they say most of the ads shown in websites are crappy and not suitable for them. Removing or blocking this ad makes the website load faster and look less cluttered.
In addition, this ad-blocker serve the job of protecting user’s privacy by blocking any tracking cookies on the website.
On the way, we Indian’s have our own way to tackle the situation. There are already several hacks and tricks to read the news article from ad-blocker blocked news websites.
Update list (Indian news publisher websites with Ad-blocker blocker) – The Time of India, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, Dainik Bhaskar, Live Hindustan, India today, The Hindu and Amar Ujala.