Yoss wrote:Fun With Mr. Fudge wrote:They don't like providing a built in audience for commenters to swoop in and get attention.
That's definitely something they should have thought about before putting a comment section on their site. The way they've treated their commenting community (not to mention any hapless bastard who innocently wanders into the hateful cesspool that is PWoT) is beyond unprofessional. It's childish, entitled, and worst of all, hypocritical. David Wong has repeatedly referred to the comment section as a "cancer," so where does anyone get off charging money to participate?
I wish they'd just make up their damn minds - either the comment section is an important and valuable part of their website, or it's fucking NOT and should be eliminated. Trying to have it both ways like this is just childish and will result in some MAJOR financial losses.
I don't know why they haven't considered trying to use an Ad-block detector. Of course, there's a subtle art to using one of those professionally. If you've fixed it so everyone on your site is allowing ads, then you CANNOT keep greedily cramming loud, obnoxious malware onto every square inch, the way you did to make up for all the people who were blocking them. Traffic will just leave and never come back because frankly, it's been a LONG TIME since the content on that site was worth the full ad load it presents. However, most of the sites where I've seen this tactic tend to keep their ads tasteful and discreet, which they can afford to do when EVERY SINGLE READER is seeing them... if they don't get greedy.