Big media blocks the blockers

Shame on you, cheapskates of cyberspace. You won’t cough up the price of a ticket to watch a movie. Instead, you download illegal copies of Udta Punjab off torrent websites. On top of that, you install plug-ins on your browsers that block the primary source of revenue for legacy media — advertisements.

Well for those of you for whom ABP stands as much for Adblock Plus as it does for Anandabazar Patrika, here’s a newsflash: if you want to catch up on news from India and abroad on one of Indian media’s biggies, well, you can’t. Not unless you disable or uninstall your ad blocker anyway. As of Friday, articles on the news websites of The Times Group (The Times of India and The Economic Times and Mirror), Hindustan Times and Hindustan, India Today, NDTV, Dainik Bhaskar and Amar Ujala cannot be accessed by those using ad blockers with their browsers.

In each case, you can access the home page. Depending on which news website you are browsing, what happens next is different. On The Times of India and The Economic Times, users of ad blockers are automatically redirected to a ‘blocked’ page. So, instead of the article, what you read is this: “Thanks for visiting The Times of India/The Economic Times. You seem to have an Ad Blocker on. Please turn it off in order to continue, or visit the HOME PAGE for a list of most important news of the day.” Along with that, you are provided with “steps to disable adblocker”, which are actually step-by-step instructions for uninstalling ad blockers.

India Today has done something similar, as has Hindustan, the Hindi daily of HT Media Limited. Deceptively, the former has a button that reads “continue to site”, but clicking on it without doing anything about the ad blocker will only put you in an endless loop. Mercifully, India Today only requests you to ‘whitelist’ them (that is, add their website to a list of exceptions) and not disable or uninstall the ad blocker. It also reminds us how it is “India’s most trusted news source”.

Hindustan Times on the other hand lets you view the headline, byline, dateline, visual, caption and opening paragraph of the article. Rather helpfully, it lets you share the article with your friends on various social media platforms, at least some of whom (presumably) are not tech savvy enough to have blockers installed. Like The Times of India and The Economic Times, step-by-step instructions are provided. Like India Today, they only ask that you tell your ad blocker to make an exception for their website. On Friday, NDTV jumped on the bandwagon. Their ‘block’ page is called ‘Welcome’. Small mercies.

Now it’s not as if no other ad revenue-based media outlets around the world have noticed that their readers have started using ad blockers with their browsers. But unlike their Indian counterparts, they respect their readers, or at the very least pretend to. So, while Forbes has also denied access to its content, they have been nice enough to provide an ‘ad-light’ version to those who disable their blockers. Across the pond, The Guardian makes a case for good journalism, that too in as unobtrusive a way as possible — a thin banner with one of many appeals that can actually be closed.

This despite the fact that ads on international news websites such as The Guardian do not usually come in the way of your browsing experience. Unlike, say, banner ads. Or rollover ads that blow up in your face. Or those exasperating ads that unfurl themselves from one side of the screen to the other or descend like curtains on a mediocre movie that you wished you had downloaded off torrents instead of watching in the theatre.

Instead of holding its audience to ransom, legacy media needs to reinvent itself. Perhaps it is time for web designers and marketing teams to work a little harder and make ads less annoying and reader experience smoother. May be it can even take a cue from new media and make better use of native advertising, though that has its problems too. But ploughing through jacket ads to reach the front page of Hindustan Times is more annoying than encountering a RED initiative on one of the inside pages of The Indian Express. The preferences port well from print to digital.

But the design of Indian news websites is unlikely to improve any time soon. So, in the meantime, what do you do? No, you don’t have to uninstall your ad blocker. Sure, you might choose to ‘whitelist’ one or more of these sites. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you could open specific links in an incognito window. In case of Hindustan, India Today and Amar Ujala, a possible workaround is clicking ‘stop’ before the article page fully loads (this does not work for Hindustan Times, The Times of India,The Economic Times or Dainik Bhaskar but helps circumvent the free article limit of The New York Times).

Of course, there is a good chance that you (like us) do not want to compromise. So if you don’t like ads but like the news, pay to keep it free. Subscribe to Newslaundry.