Forbes has been doing this for a while on its website. (Or, at least for a while it has been detecting the ad blocking-software that I have been using for much longer.) I have basically stopped reading Forbes (which maybe was a good idea on other grounds) and have learned to appreciate stories from competing publications. If Wired doesn't want my eyeballs to visit its site, I'll just stop bringing them there.
Wired is in the business of making money. You don't pay them any money directly, so they make it up by showing you ads. If you're going them to prevent them from making money that way, then they don't give a hoot about your eyeballs.
Correction: they make it up by giving third parties the ability to lift each and every bit of identifiable information available from your browser, to profile you, to sell your demographic information (lat/lon/approximate age/wealth/family situation/etc, etc) to middlemen who will then in turn sell the opportunity to advertise to you in a real time bidding process to the highest bidder, some ad agency that bought campaign inventory.
If it was just the ads I highly doubt there would be any issue at all.
Exactly. If Wired would show me static image ads that do not slow down my browser with scripts and use my bandwidth to track me across the web, I would add them to my whitelist.
Wired may or may not, I don't know. But they are the facilitator for this info. Also, Facebook and Google may have "opt out" procedures, but they've been... less than trustworthy with those in the past, and I simply don't trust them.
And every time I've relented and turned off my ad blocker for a domain, they have made be regret it and I turn it back on (and often never visit the site again).
When will these clueless execs realize that if they didn't abuse our eyeballs they'd have our eyeballs?
They realize it all right. But the money is just too good and the arms race dictates they join in or be left in the dust. It's a hard problem, and I don't think wired has found the answer just yet.
Try switching to Adblock Edge, if for no other reason than it doesn't have the whitelist. No idea if Forbes is on the whitelist. However I use ublock now. (Firefox not chrome also, if it makes a difference)
