The New York Times is surveying 700,000 readers who use ad blockers
Off the heels of blocking a “relatively small” amount of ad block users from accessing The New York Times’ website, the newspaper is ratcheting up its anti-ad blocking campaign with a massive reader survey.
Digiday first noticed the website’s survey yesterday. The Times told us that the survey is being sent out to 200,000 digital subscribers and 500,000 non-subscribers, all of whom are using an ad blocker.
The survey consists of a dozen questions beginning with broader questions about the user’s ad blocking habits before narrowing to questions specifically about the Times’ website, including if they would consider whitelisting The Times, ranking the most bothersome type of Internet ads and guilting them with questions like: “Are you aware that blocking ads on the website prevents The New York Times from making money to supports it operations?”
Here’s a sampling of the questions:
The survey is only the latest move in the Times’ public stance against ad blockers. In March, it began showing some ad blocker users a pop-up asking to be whitelisted or buy a digital subscription, issuing this statement:
“We are opposed to ad blocking, which does not serve the long term interest of consumers. The creation of quality news content is expensive and digital advertising is one way that The New York Times and other high quality news providers fund news gathering operations.”
Digital subscribers continue to grow for the Times, but digital ad revenue dropped 1 percent to $42 million, a figure that only encompasses about a third of its total ad revenue, according to the paper’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2016.
More in Media
Meta AI rolls out several enhancements across apps and websites with its newest Llama 3
Meta AI, which first debuted in September, also got a number of updates including ways to search for real-time information through integrations with Google and Bing.
Walmart rolls out a self-serve, supplier-driven insights connector
The retail giant paired its insights unit Luminate with Walmart Connect to help suppliers optimize for customer consumption, just in time for the holidays, explained the company’s CRO Seth Dallaire.
Research Briefing: BuzzFeed pivots business to AI media and tech as publishers increase use of AI
In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine BuzzFeed’s plans to pivot the business to an AI-driven tech and media company, how marketers’ use of X and ad spending has dropped dramatically, and how agency executives are fed up with Meta’s ad platform bugs and overcharges, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.