This is a nice post from an organization that clearly cares about their readers. That&#x27;s hard to write, and the staff at Wired deserve credit for their effort to be open and direct with us.<p>Unfortunately the post fails to address the reasons that their readers USE ad blockers. If only they had gone a LITTLE bit farther in this post and made specific promises in exchange for being whitelisted. Here are the promises that would have convinced me.<p>- Third party scripts will be kept to under 33% of page weight. (They&#x27;re at ~50% for this article, and that&#x27;s with a 1.1MB gif in the content!)<p>- We will respect &quot;do not track&quot; headers in your browser (or settings on your Wired account) by excluding you from ad- and analytics-related tracking<p>- If you have enabled &quot;do not track&quot; headers in your browser, we will only serve you anonymous ads<p>- We may serve you ads based on your browsing behavior at wired.com, but they will always include a short explanation. For example, &quot;because you were interested in XXXX:&quot;<p>- Our ad placement and content will follow strict limitations (link to a public page of their guidelines), based on the the Adblock &quot;Acceptable Ads&quot; rules (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adblockplus.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;acceptable-ads#criteria" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adblockplus.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;acceptable-ads#criteria</a>).<p>- We will serve all content and ads over HTTPS, from within the wired.com TLD (or include a list of specific sources), so you can trust that it&#x27;s really coming from us.<p>Since Wired doesn&#x27;t offer to address any of the issues that make (technical) people enable an ad blocker, the post is reduced to an ultimatum. They&#x27;re asking you to make a special exception for Wired, and offering only a stick as incentive. No carrot, no quid pro quo, and no addressing your concerns. And they&#x27;re doing it on a 3.3MB page with 1.5MB worth of third party ads and tracking code attached.<p>Giving an ultimatum to 20% of your readership sounds like a stupid business strategy, and I doubt it&#x27;s what the Wired board had in mind. Perhaps they could learn something from app designers: if something is so objectionable about your Ux that 20% of your user base uses third party alternatives to get at your content, try a little market research to improve that Ux. Just do a cursory investigation into WHAT people find so terrible, and WHY they use the alternative; consider how you might change your Ux to make that unnecessary. This is 20% of your userbase who likes your content so much, they find ways to access it despite a shitty OOTB Ux. It would be a big sacrifice to cut off such a dedicated (and large) group of fans.