Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
WIRED has never been neutral. For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it’s true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures…
There’s an ongoing conversation about race and racism on social media — but white people are missing most of it. A Pew Research Center report released Monday asked Americans who identified as black, white, and Hispanic about how much they post about race, and how much content they see about it. Pew studied “social media…
Using Facebook is a trade. You get a way to socialize over the Internet, and the company gets to rent out your eyeballs to advertisers. But today Facebook signaled that it thinks millions of people are cheating on that deal by using ad-blocking browser extensions. The social network says that it will start tweaking…
Facebook can’t win the war it started on ad blockers last week. So say Princeton assistant professor Arvind Narayanan and undergraduate Grant Storey, who have created an experimental ad “highlighter” for the Chrome browser to prove it. When you have Facebook Ad Highlighter installed, ads in the News Feed are grayed out and written…
June 13, 2016 4:04 a.m. ET As consumer adoption of online ad-blocking tools continues to grow, publishers and media companies are experimenting with various ways to limit the impact of ad-blocking on their businesses. That’s given rise to a new breed of “anti-ad-blockers”, or technology companies hoping to cash in on the situation by selling…
New York Times President and CEO, Mark Thompson addressed the IAB Ad Blocking Summit, held June 6, 2016 in New York City. In his talk, An Update from The New York Times on Its Approach to Ad Blocking, Thompson took a hard look at the factors contributing to the rise of ad blocking and urged…
Today ad-blocking is mostly restricted to desktop web browsers. But iOS 9, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, will include support for ad blockers when it becomes available in the fall. Several ad-blocking firms are already creating apps for the new OS; when it’s out, you’ll simply download an ad blocker and no longer have to…
By Andrew Bosworth, VP, Ads & Business Platform As more and more content has shifted to the internet, online experiences have improved dramatically, becoming more immersive and intuitive. But many digital ads haven’t kept up. We’ve all experienced a lot of bad ads: ads that obscure the content we’re trying to read, ads that slow down…
Photo As it blocks ad blockers, Facebook is asking its users to help control the ads they see on the site. SAN FRANCISCO — Digital ads pop up online so frequently and ubiquitously that many people are using software to block them. But if you try to stop ads from showing up on Facebook’s desktop…
If there’s one macro trend with which almost every publisher is struggling, it’s the increasing distribution power of platforms like Facebook, and how that is continuing to disrupt traditional media business models. Where they once controlled the entire process from creation to consumption, media companies now see their power over almost all the elements of…