Categories: OLD Media Moves

FT blocks content for users with ad blockers

The Financial Times has blocked content for all registered users with ad blockers installed, reports Lucinda Southern of Digiday.

Southern writes, “As of this week, registered users — those who have provided their email address in exchange for a number of free articles a month, but haven’t shared any payment details — are hit with a pop-up telling them to whitelist FT.com, then refresh their browsers to continue reading.

“The pop-up message links to a webpage showing readers how to add the FT to their ad blocker whitelist, with added commentary on what ad blocking is, and the FT’s advertising policy.

“Craig Bannister, senior product manager at the FT, said this is an extension of the four-week experiment the FT ran last July to a sample of 15,000. The FT ran three types of messages to 50 percent of the 30,000 registered users who also block ads, encouraging them to whitelist the site. These included offering unrestricted access to the content with a polite message; access to the content but with some article text missing; and a blanket ban on the content altogether.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.