| Do we have any evidence that these issues are really the causes of people consuming news elsewhere? - Clickbait headings with misleading information Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking? - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for? - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users? - Taking massive performance hits (specifically on mobile due to huge JavaScript blocks) Maybe getting closer to what users actually care about - Pop-up ads Again - any evidence this puts normal internet users off so much they'd stop using a site? There must be a reason MEDIUM.COM and every single recipe blog pops up their newsletter subscription as intrusively as possible. - Fixed headers or footers which leads to harder readability / accidental element interactions Here's again an actual deterrent - if someone physically can't use a site, they might actually give up. --- I'm not saying news sites are not dumpster fires, but I'm a techie and love a good boycott. I'd question the premise of this article - it seems to be very much from a techie privacy-active (not just concerned, but actually willing to take action) perspective which I suspect does not represent the majority of the internet. I suspect that if people are actually using news sites less, it's because of much simpler reasons...like that Google intercepts a user's attempt to read news linking to their favourite publications. |
> Does this really put off more than about 10% of people? Even if people find it distasteful, do people actually resist clicking?
I don't know, but I certainly know that there are news (mostly tech news) websites I have all but entirely stopped engaging with because any time I go to them, I read one headline ("This Spotify-feature has been wanted for years!", "Do you see what HP has done here?", "See what Dell has done", something like that) and just close out the tab again.
Maybe it puts of "just" 10% of people, but 10% is a fairly big chunk, isn't it?
> - Disabling the user from reading if ad-block is present
> What percentage of users use ad blockers these days? And how many just disable it to read the thing they were willing to click for?
A random article saying it's 40% on laptops, 15% on mobile: https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-...
Another article saying it's 22% of people in the UK, 32% of people in germany, etc: https://www.emarketer.com/content/ad-blocking-in-the-uk-2018
Those were just the two first results on Google for the query "what percentage of users are using ad blockers".
I don't know how many people just leave when a page asks them to disable their ad blockers, but I have to imagine it's a fairly big chunk of people who use ad blockers, which, as shown above, is a fairly big chunk of internet users.
> - Tracking the user with 3rd party scripts
> Ok who actually leaves a site they believe tracks them? like 0.0001% of web users?
I don't know, I'm fairly sure the issue with pervasive tracking is relatively well known even among non-"techies". How many regular users haven't been told to use an ad blocker by a tech-literate friend, with third-party tracking being one of the reasons cited?
The vast majority of people may not avoid a website just because of invisible trackers (except maybe due to the massive performance hits from all the javascript), but I imagine the knowledge of such tracking scripts at least affects the percentage of people who are willing to disable their ad blockers when a page asks.