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Five months after Apple ( AAPL ) opened the door to ad blocking on mobile devices, news site Wired has become the latest publication to charge users who have installed ad-blocking tools. “We know that you come to our site primarily to read our content, but it’s important to be clear that advertising is how we keep Wired going: paying the writers, editors, designers, engineers and all the other staff that works so hard to create the stories you read and watch here,” Wired told its readers in a post Monday. The publication said 20% of its traffic comes from readers who are blocking its website ads. Wired said visitors using ad blockers will not have full access to articles on its site. It said website visitors can either agree to see ads or pay about $1 a week for an ad-free subscription. Some media firms, including Comcast ( CMCSA )-owned NBC, will not allow people using ad blockers to watch videos on their sites, while the Guardian and the Washington Post are among media sites that are prodding people who use ad blockers to pay for subscriptions instead. Support for ad blocking built into Apple iOS 9 means that iPhone and iPad users can install ad-blocking services from the Apple App store. Those products give people the power to pull the plug on Web advertising, including banner ads, pop-up ads and auto-play videos. About 16% of the U.S. online population blocked Web ads during Q2 2015, according to a September study by Adobe Systems ( ADBE ) and PageFair. Ad blocking could could cost publishers $41.4 billion globally this year, up from $21.8 billion in 2015, according to that study. There Is No ‘Free’ Internet “There has never been any such thing as free Internet, as users either pay with cash or with personal data/advertising. The experience is ‘free,’ but a return is earned by using users’ personal data to generate advertising or relevant marketing,” wrote Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor in an industry note Tuesday. “The problem is that virtually all users who are paying with personal data do not realize that they are actually paying for the services that they consume.” For consumers, Windsor said, being expected to pay for services they’d been getting for free “is seen as a huge price increase, rather than paying for the service in a different way. Because paying with personal data has been almost invisible to many users for many years, it has perpetuated the myth that the Internet is free,” he wrote. Windsor added that “with many legitimate and well-respected businesses that depend on advertising to make a living, the threat of having it cut off could put them out of business.” He says users will likely turn off their ad blockers without much fuss. He also said he sees “no threat to the revenues of Alphabet ( GOOGL )-owned Google, Facebook ( FB ), Twitter ( TWTR ) and so on.” On those “walled garden” sites, ads are already fashioned to look like other content on the site and are embedded in news feeds and blog pages, and they aren’t blocked. Some other analysts, though, say the rise of ad blocking could shift more ad spending to apps rather than traditional online ads, where Google dominates. Google is facing increasing search-ad competition from Microsoft ‘s ( MSFT ) Web portal Bing, Internet search engine Yahoo ( YHOO ) and e-commerce king Amazon.com ( AMZN ), which has boosted its own direct search offerings as Google moves forward with its search-based Google Shopping service. Image provided by Shutterstock . Scalper1 News
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