This week, another beloved treasure of the internet closed its doors. The Awl announced it was closing up shop, ostensibly suffering from the economic volatility present in today’s “media” industry. In short, they didn’t make enough money, and it’s probably thanks to ad blockers.
Let this be a lesson to us all: if you want to keep the free content you love alive (or do your part and not actively destroy it) turn off your ad blocker. At least for the blogs you love to read.
Image credit: Coffee Channel
The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino lamented The Awl’s closure, adding it to a list of defunct sites both beloved by niche audiences and hated by large social media platforms for the very reason they attracted small followings of devoted fans: the content is too absurd to scale. And your Chrome extension, ostensibly installed to punish the most egregious offenders of the privilege that is your attention, doesn’t help keep that blog you love alive.
Think of it this way: that writer you adore, the one whose work actually makes you laugh, the one whose prose intrigues you to no end, compelling you to share it with your friends, relatives, and colleagues with an appropriate quip in the shared Slack channel or group iMessage thread?
Chances are high they need to eat more than you need to not be the target audience for one of an innumerable army of endless advertisements based on your browsing history, catering to every overt and implicit desire you harbour within your meat sack. How can you help prevent this tragedy from once again occurring to a domain you know and love? Whitelist the site!
How to Whitelist Your Sites
Whitelisting your favourite sites should be a no-brainer, especially if you’re paying absolutely nothing for them. Whitelisting a site means, for the most part, your ad-blocker looks the other way. Advertising impressions get served, (silent) autoplay videos play, everybody wins.
Ghostery
The Ghostery ad-blocking extension makes it pretty simple to either whitelist or disable all annoying ads from your favourite site. We’re here to help your favourite site, though, so here’s how to do it. Simply select Ghostery in your browser, click the Trust Site option, and refresh the page.
Adblock Plus
Adblock Plus kills ads in a manner more responsible than other ad-blocking counterparts, and allows certain ads considered non-intrusive under its Acceptable Ads initiative.
Full-page advertisement takeovers will be gone, but you’ll still get your eyes on some header and footer ads, as long as they aren’t too large or obfuscating. To add a site to your whitelist, hit your Adblock Plus icon, and click the “Enabled on This Website” option. Refresh the page and let the sponsorships wash over you. Remember: it’s for a good cause.
Comments
6 responses to “Whitelist Your Favourite Blog To Save It From Ad-Blocker Destruction”
Unfortunately it’s a very dangerous recommendation to make. We’ve seen, far too often, malicious advertising or even just false advertising, through blogs, and even more reputable websites.
If blogs, like this one, want people to turn off their ad ablockers, they need to make a commitment to their readers that the ads will never, under any circumstances, act malicious or deceptively. I see no published policy of what this site’s commitments are to it’s readers in this regard.
Yeah, let’s not forget that adblocking is a defence mechanism, not an act of greed or malice.
Giant banners that follow you down the page as you scroll, auto-playing video and audio, pop-in windows that block you from clicking a link in the hope you’ll click the ad instead, timed hijackers that redirect…
Content creators invited this shit in, and we had to defend ourselves against it. Trust, once gone, is very hard to rebuild.
Yeah, I don’t use ad blockers because I don’t want to see ads, I use them because the ads are obnoxious, annoying, take up huge amounts of bandwidth and sometimes dangerous. I’ll happily disable them on certain sites, including Lifehacker, but websurfers are not to blame for ad blocking.
Come on now lifehacker you know the NBN is still a mess And as such not everyone’s a winner of videos automatically stealing peoples bandwidth.
OK, LH (and affiliate sites like Giz).
Would you like to explain why you need, according to my Ghostery findings, 35 ( that’s THIRTY-FIVE) trackers on this page, made up of :-
Advertising: 26
Essential: 1
Site Analytics: 6
Social Media: 2
It also notes that 4 are “slow and/or non-secure”.
As mentioned above, I have enough problems with minimal bandwidth. I don’t need extra stuff being leeched by all these hangers-on.
Dont use obnoxius shitty ads that install adware and ill disable Ublock.
Any site that uses auto play videos gets ads blocked automatically.