Once they deactivate the software they can gain access to the video.
“We have to find a viable economic model. Either the user pays for a premium model or he accepts advertising,” said Xavier Spender, deputy managing director of L’Equipe group.
Sean Blanchfield, CEO of PageFair, compared the campaign against ad blockers to the music industry’s takedown of the file-sharing program Napster a decade ago.
“They should instead learn from the Napster story that the users will ultimately get what they want,” said Blanchfield, whose company works with publishers to devise ads that “respect users’ privacy”.
For Helene Chartier, head of French web developers’ union SRI, the big mistake was to let users believe the internet was free in the first place, considering “there was never a problem with ads on television or radio.”
Industry professionals said the growing rejection of ads — and the shrinking space for them on mobile devices — should spur advertisers to come up with less intrusive messages.
In a sign of how seriously the problem is being taken in the industry, Google has launched an alternative to web advertising.
Called Google Contributor it charges users between 1 and 3 dollars a month to be spared ads, with the fee going to the affected websites.
In levying the fee Google urges users to “support” their favourite websites.
The idea is currently being tested on around a dozen US websites, including The Onion, Science Daily and Mashable.
