This is a feature by Carl Sullivan in the May 5, 2003, issue of Editor & Publisher about a problem that was just coming into focus for newspaper Web sites: the filtering technologies readers were installing to protect themselves from spam and pop-up advertising were also blocking the e-mail and the ads newspapers were sending.
Sullivan opens with the e-mail news alerts newspapers sent when 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart was found near Salt Lake City in March 2003. Words like “teenager,” “kidnapped,” and “girl” tripped spam filters that mistook the alerts for pornography. Ron Currier, chief technology officer of Boulder-based PublishMail, which handled reader e-mail for more than 30 newspapers, described the result:
They bounced like crazy
The other half of the story was ad blocking. Sullivan cites a March 2003 Forrester Research study showing 14% of online consumers were using some form of ad-blocking software, up from about 1% a year earlier — with another 13% saying they hadn’t known such software existed until the pollsters asked, and would now consider installing it. The article quotes a long list of online newspaper executives on pop-ups, pop-unders, blacklists and whitelists, including Jason Krebs of NYTimes.com, Greg Schermer of Lee Enterprises, Ian Murdock of Hearst Newspapers, Ginger Neal of Freedom Orange County Information, and Jeff Webber of USAToday.com.
I was quoted twice, identified as a principal at the Finberg-Gentry consultancy — my partnership with Steve Gentry, also listed in the article as The Digital Futurist Consultancy — and as a faculty member at the Poynter Institute. The first quote follows a mention of our 2001 report for the Newspaper Association of America, which found that many publishers were generating new print subscriptions through pop-up house ads on their own Web sites:
Web publishers have to wean themselves off those or find additional ways to promote the paper. They were effective, but now’s the time to move off of them or to at least supplement them with banner and tile advertising.
Sullivan notes that we were working on a follow-up report about using the Net to promote print subscriptions, expected to be released by NAA that summer. My second quote closes the piece, alongside PowerOne Media’s David Teitler asking whether the Web would end up an advertising-supported medium at all:
Consumers recognize that there’s value in advertising. The real challenge for Web sites is to find the right visual model that conveys the message in an effective way without angering readers.
That challenge didn’t get any easier. The article also points to what became the answer for a while — contextual “sponsored links” served next to editorial content, then being tested at USAToday.com through Applied Semantics, a company Google had just purchased.