psa Anti-adblock message now lets you bypass it for 24 hours

[Steven P.]

Just over a week ago, we enabled an anti-adblock solution to Neowin because according to measured stats, 51% block ads on the site that costs money to run to try and bring you a service that doesn't go down every five minutes and is properly hosted on multiple servers that we have purchased on hosting that isn't cheap.

 

All of our advertising is inline, no popups! And while we do show larger and more ads to guests, it is even fewer and smaller ads if you create a free member account. All we are asking is to help a little bit toward the running costs of the site. This is why we have advertisements in the first place, and even sponsored posts that members suggested we do to try and offset advertising (but it only accounts for a small portion of revenue) can be hidden by members.

 

Members can hide sponsored posts (you have to be signed in to see the option).

 

So I really feel we do a lot to appease members with the different amount of ads vs guests and being able to block sponsored posts, but of course people still whine about this without offering a viable alternative, you will always have those people 😛 

 

For this reason, and following a week of testing there's now an option to watch a 30sec video ad which disables the popup for 24 hours, meaning even those members can continue adblocking, with a slight twist. If you decide to "continue with adblocker" the first two page views are "free" after that the popup will return after every page.

 

The popup with all the options, including a way to subscribe for $28 a year for an adfree experience (including blocking of all trackers).

 

Of course the alternative is to whitelist us, stop visiting Neowin or brag about this in one of the two threads in the "Soapbox" forum, those who brag about blocking ads and post workarounds to add to their adblockers are moved to a "special" member group so that those members use less of our resources, which cost money.

 

I wish everything was free or that we could rely solely on subscriptions and the kindness of hosts and server manufacturers, but that isn't reality. If you want us to stick around for another 19 years we have to have the means to be able to grow, and with over half of our readers blocking that revenue stream, I can only tell you that it is getting harder and harder to do.