Forbes loosens policy on ad blockers

Business magazine Forbes has apparently loosened its policy preventing readers using ad blockers from accessing its site, reports Laura Hazard Owen of Nieman Lab.

Owen writes, “Forbes was still preventing me from visiting the site with an adblocker on Tuesday, but several of my colleagues accessed it with adblockers on. Forbes did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Tuesday, so we can’t be sure whether or not it’s a policy shift or a backend snafu.

“In recent months, sites like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have taken cues from Forbes and Wired and are getting tougher on users with adblockers enabled. Both the Times and the Journal are greeting some adblocker users with messages asking them to whitelist the sites or subscribe; even some people who already pay for subscriptions are seeing the adblocking messages. The Guardian has also said that it will consider ‘stricter’ measures against adblocker users (for now, it just gently notes at the bottom of a page that it has detected an adblocker).

“Not surprisingly, all of these policies have annoyed certain users, but Forbes’ appeared to inspire particular aggravation and mocking, perhaps in part because Forbes is not viewed as an essential news source (this tweet is fairly representative).”

Read more here.