Adblock

I think the original poster's thinking is that if you can somehow get an editorial in front of those AdBlock users that is favourable to a particular product, they are more likely to take that seriously. I.e. once you've convinced them it isn't advertising, they'll believe it. I don't really believe that either, because I think that turning ads off is far more of a statement about being highly selective of the information one chooses to believe than just about not getting bouncing GIFs and monkeys to punch.

From my point of view, if turning AdBlock on is killing publishing, then it deserves to die. I subscribe to LWN not because paying turns off the ads but because it has genuinely good, useful and in-depth content. I would stop my subscription if I believed that the stories were becoming merely promotional material from vendors.

The whole news industry is struggling with this, with paywalls and advertising and free content and subscriptions all stewed together, sometimes seemingly randomly. The one underlying factor is trust and brand loyalty - people would rather read a source they trust, and converting that into a dollar value is the hard part. When journalists tell us that they don't report news because it's not in the advertisers interests, they've immediately shown where their true loyalties lie - and it's not to their readers.

Have fun,

Paul