Summary
Andrew Brown of The Guardian asks if the dramatic rise of ad-blocking software will undermine the commercial model behind most free news on the internet. He finds an industry in deep concern over the "Ad-blockalypse" - with these new programmes meaning that advertisers may refuse to continue to subsidise online news providers if consumers are now no longer seeing their online adverts. Can the industry persuade people to pay for what was previously available at no charge? And if not, can commercial online news services survive? Producer: Katie Inman.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading analysis from the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | This week Andrew Brown explores whether ad blocking software |
| 0:07.0 | will undermine the commercial model behind free news on the internet. |
| 0:11.0 | I've been a professional journalist for 25 years now, |
| 0:16.0 | and lately I've realized that I've got it all wrong. |
| 0:19.2 | There's been a big misconception within the news |
| 0:22.4 | and journalism business that news is the stuff that |
| 0:26.3 | journalists tell people it is and actually there's a far better formula for what |
| 0:31.0 | news is news for any person is stuff I care about, stuff I want to |
| 0:35.2 | pass on, but it's not necessarily the things that newspapers put on front pages or page 12 |
| 0:40.7 | or whatever. So we've been in the wrong business all this time. |
| 0:45.0 | No, no, we've been in the right business, but you just tend to think of it in slightly |
| 0:50.1 | different ways from the way it actually works. |
| 0:53.4 | I was talking there to the technology journalist Charles Arthur |
| 0:57.2 | about the revolution which has overwhelmed the news business |
| 1:00.6 | since it moved on to the internet. I'm Andrew Brown and in this analysis I'm |
| 1:06.3 | going to explore the two great revolutions in modern journalism. The first that |
| 1:12.1 | flooded the internet with free news and the second almost |
| 1:16.5 | unnoticed which threatens to drain the free stuff all away. News is something we think of as vital to a functioning free society. Without news there can be no truth. |
| 1:36.7 | Without truth there can be no freedom, unfree societies are those based on lies. But the news itself isn't free. It costs hundreds of millions |
| 1:47.0 | of pounds to produce it and if the reader doesn't pay for that someone else must. So this is the story of the rise of the |
| 1:55.4 | advertising revolution and then the counter-revolution, |
... |
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