Featured in "Innovation & Kommunikation" Resumé

Resumé; the leading advertising and media trade press from Bonnier media in Sweden has a special newsletter called Innovation&Kommunikation that goes more in depth on trends, you can subscribe to it here. Some choice bits from the article, which is about the trend of ad-blocking in general and the current lack of a viable income alternative for publishers below. The article talks about Brave, People.io, and the fact that we may have reached peak content.

In anticipation of the Spotify for media
2015 was the year of the adblocker, and an alarming problem for digital media. It will not slow down this year.

Åsk Wäppling is a hidden power player in the advertising world, who has had enough of digital advertisings negative consequences. For the past 20 years, she has pursued Adland, one of the world's most widely read advertising sites with a speciality in Super Bowl advertising. A site about advertising that is read by people all over the world who work in advertising, but on the site there is next no advertising. The only exception is a small ad for those who want to comment on texts but not members or logged in. "There are so many people who spam in the comments, we can get that back earning a little advertising money," explains Åsk Wäppling.

When Apple last year released the mobile operating system iOS 9, which allows so-called adblockers, the number of people who used adblockers rose fast at Adland. From 10 percent to 65 percent in a short time. And it is thus that people feed on creating advertising effort to the extent that they install special plugins to remove ads. "But I do not think we are that bothered by advertising as long as it sticks to the usual places on the sites. An important reason to use adblockers is that ad networks let through viruses and malware. More people are aware of this and think it's terribly unpleasant that ad networks know too much about them. They want to preserve their privacy. "It was this development that made Åsk Wäppling offer as a service, or a statement if you wish, the ability to reach Adland through the Tor network (sometimes called" the dark web ") which anonymize user and prevents data collection (the address is https: //zpvluacf3b3cjxm7.onion). A adblocker on site level, as it were. "Even advertising lovers care about their privacy."

Åsk Wäppling at Adland thinks that banners are already passé and is hoping for micro payments instead. "There has never been developed because everyone focused on banners instead." She points out that it appears more and more short-term subscriptions and other similar offerings but today the cost of using payment services like PayPal too high.