Professor Eric Goldman Stops Writing At Forbes, In Part Because Of Its Stance On Ad Blocking

Law professor Eric Goldman (who has guest blogged here on occasion) has announced that he'll no longer be blogging at Forbes. There are a few different reasons why -- including some personal/family related ones, but one of the reasons that stands out is that he's unhappy with Forbes' decision to block people using ad blockers:

Forbes turns away readers who use ad blockers, and that creates problems for me. First, I've heard complaints that the technology misidentifies some users as using ad blockers when they don't, leaving those users stuck. Second, many of my readers do use ad blockers, and Forbes' policy hinders those readers from being able to read my posts. Worse, I felt like I lost some reader goodwill for contributing to a venue with an unpopular ad blocking policy.

We've discussed Forbes' anti-ad blocker policies, even wondering if we should stop linking to Forbes articles. I know that, for a while, Forbes was misidentifying me as using an ad blocker and not letting me access stories on the site. I can say that, more than once, I wasn't able to read some of Goldman's posts, that we might have written about, because of those blocks.

Most of our focus was on how this impacted readers and also folks like us who might send Forbes traffic -- but it's worth also thinking about how it impacts writers as well, and taking away their audience, or otherwise upsetting them. We've seen in the past some writers leave publications that had put up paywalls, and now the same impact may be happening for those that block ad blockers as well.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story