Business Insider explores paid site in England to fight ad blockers

Business Insider’s British website is looking at a paid website to help it battle ad blockers, writes Ross Benes of Digiday.

Benes writes, “Within the next few weeks, BI U.K. will begin testing an anti-ad blocker for both mobile and desktop that gives ad-blocking users a few options to fund the content they are consuming. Users blocking ads will be given a prompt that states in order to receive the content they can either whitelist BI, pay for an ad-free subscription or pay a few pennies to obtain a specific article ad free.

“The U.K. is the first market that BI will test the product in, and it is a different product than the whitelist prompts that BI already uses in the U.S., Childs said. When asked why the product is being tested first in the U.K., Childs said that ‘Europe has a higher rate of ad block, but we are conscious there could be geographical differences [in test results].’

“A BI spokesperson said that 24 percent of BI U.K. desktop visitors use an blocker compared to 9 percent of U.S. visitors. Mobile ad blocking figures were miniscule in both the U.S. and U.K., but reports suggest that segment will grow.

“There is no definitive timeline on when these options might be rolled out to all BI U.K. users or if all the options in the testing will make it to the broader market, but Childs suspected that BI will likely A/B test the anti-ad blocker for a few months.”

Read more here.