Malvertising – still silent but more deadly – as criminals infiltrate ad agencies
We are all used to unwanted adverts popping up on screens and well inured to them by now. Which is precisely why the latest generation of malvertising is so dangerous and why Mozilla's Firefox now has a stone-wall ad-blocker function in place﻿. On-line advert technology is such that criminals no longer need you to click on the ad itself; they have essentially infiltrated the advertising agency and impregnated bona-fide ads with malware. Cyber-criminals are focusing on free-sites that rely on advertising for revenue, with names such as Huffington Post, Forbes and the Daily Mail among the most targeted sites. Meanwhile CityAM became the first free-sheet to try and block the ad-blockers yesterday.

Daily financial freesheet City AM has become the first UK newspaper to ban readers who use ad blockers from its website.

City AM is launching a trial from Tuesday that will blur out text of stories on cityam.com for desktop users of Firefox browsers who are detected using ad blocking software.

Readers will be encounter a message saying: “We are having trouble showing you adverts on this page, which may be a result of ad blocker software being installed on your device. As City AM relies on advertising to fund its journalism, please disable any adblockers from running on cityam.com to see the rest of this content.”

Martin Ashplant, the digital director at City AM, said about 8% of the site’s 1.2 million monthly browsers use Firefox on desktop and around 20% of those have ad blocking software installed.

The trial currently does not include any other browser types or non-desktop devices such as mobile phones and tablets.

“We want to see what the impact is and how many choose to turn ad blocking software off, and how many bounce from the site versus the normal rate,” he said. “It’s a ‘see how it goes’ plan but the strategy is we want to roll it out further quite quickly,” said Ashplant.

City AM is also providing blocked readers with a link to a Q&A page explaining how to turn off ad blockers, giving more info on why the publisher has introduced the ban, and provided a feedback form.

“We are of the view that City AM produces quality content which people value,” said Ashplant. “As an ad-funded organisation, the ability to serve adverts around this content is crucial to us continuing to provide it for free to our users. We hope that by making it clear to people that ad blocking hurts our ability to do this they will choose to turn ad blockers off on cityam.com, even if they decide to continue using them elsewhere.”

Trinity Mirror, owner of the Daily Mirror and the UK’s largest regional newspaper publisher, is also investigating a plan to stop readers using ad blocking software.

PageFair estimates that as many as 200 million web users globally use ad blockers, with 12 million in the UK, and publishers could potentially lose £14bn in revenue this year.

The UK ad market is yet to feel any financial impact from ad blocker software usage.

Fears about an explosion in ad blocking has been fuelled by Apple’s move updating its iOS operating system last month which included the ability for iPhone and iPad owners to download apps to block ads on webpages on their phones.



Ashplant said that City Am is monitoring mobile ad blocking usage but the publisher does not yet make a lot of revenue from mobile ads and that ad blocking on IOS9 devices is still “embryonic”.

Last week, Germany’s Axel Springer moved to ban readers who use adblockers from its Bild tabloid website.

Visitors to the website of Bild, Europe’s top-selling tabloid, are asked to switch off the adblocker or pay a monthly fee of €2.99 (£2.23) to browse the website mostly ad-free.

Ashplant said that as part of the trial over the coming weeks and months, City AM would also consider options such as whether there was any appetite for paid-for access for an ad-free experience.