Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess.<p>If you feel $1 per week ($50 &#x2F; year) is too much remember that display ads to a targeted audience such as Wired&#x27;s are worth CPM rates that you&#x27;d probably not believe.<p>Tracking (oh, you thought this was about advertising?) you has value, and quite a bit of it.<p>This ad-blocker wall thing is an interesting development (and Wired is definitely not the first site doing this), I sincerely hope that wired will survive the transition, at the same time they don&#x27;t seem to understand that to lay fundamental blame for using an adblocker with that 20% of their audience (that high?). After all, it wasn&#x27;t the users that decided to substitute &#x27;ads&#x27; with &#x27;tracking&#x27;, &#x27;visual garbage&#x27; and &#x27;malware&#x27; it was the properties and the advertising companies that did that and wired does not seem to want to do much to prevent the remaining 80% or so from also installing an adblocker.<p>But ads without profiling are so much less lucrative that wired has now made &#x27;advertising on or else pay us at a rate that reflects our rate card&#x27; into their opening bid in an all-out confrontation with their users.<p>Interesting times. If this holds for a while we might have our non-commercial web back. Note that nowhere does wired say that if you do disable your adblocker that you won&#x27;t be profiled or tracked by them or their advertisers or analytics providers, privacybadger spots 8 of these on that very page.<p>I&#x27;ve seen enough of the inner workings of ad tech companies to <i>never</i> want to disable all my ad blockers, we&#x27;ll see if there is a wired article that pushes me across the line to a paying subscriber. This one would not have made the cut.<p>Someone please invent an actual working micropayments system that does not rely on a centralized entity.