Ad blocking rears its head again. Perhaps it's because Axel Springer announced positive results for their combative campaign against users running the software or perhaps it's because the executives of Eyeo, the company that codes Adblock plus, held a summit in New York with publishing and advertising execs to determine what the best way to go forward is. At any rate, the issue is far from resolved.

Eyeo, the creator of Adblock plus, invited publishers, ad agencies and academics to a summit to discuss how the parties can co-exist. This is an interesting, quick read that includes some of the rules that Eyeo thinks that advertisers should abide by in order to be placed on their white list.

If Axel Springer is telling the truth when they say that two thirds of users to Bild's site when asked to turn off their ad blocking software or pay, did so, then it would seem that the entire ad blocking kefuffle is, as Shakespeare would say, much ado about nothing. Let's see how the second month plays out before drawing grand conclusions, though.

Bilton addresses some misconceptions about what ad blocking software really blocks. For instance native advertising, seen by many as the work-around to ad blocking is, in fact frequently blocked because it comes off the same ad servers as banner ads. The comments are interesting as well, worth a quick look.

More and more people in the UK are using ad blocking software. The article is a somewhat banal, but the comments are definitely worth perusing as readers defend their ad blockers and, surprisingly, reveal a growing predilection towards payment for content.

Paper coupon-clipping may be on the way out, but saving money isn’t. Axel Springer is betting that Retale, an app that is meant to drive coupon-clippers into brick-and-mortar stores will help them build more online revenue.

A few years ago many editors and news publishers believed native advertising would undermine the credibility of journalism. But the harsh financial realities and the need for new revenue streams have softened the overall attitude.

How effective is distributed content? Interestingly, the quote that Facebook  provides news for over 60% of the population, is not actually what the survey reported, it was just misconstrued and abused for emphasis. The survey really revealed that only 4% of responders said they actually go to Facebook for news; the rest of the time their encounters with news stories and video is serendipitous.

If what Pfeiffer reports in the article above is true, then it should be no suprise that traffic to publishers from facebook is falling off the cliff; among the top 10, referral traffic is down over 40%. It could also be due, though, to publishers uploading more articles to Facebook itself and thus traffic that used to come back to a home or article page, is now being kept within Facebook's walled garden.

BBC journalists have been mandated to create shorter, snappier videos that will be popular with folks watching them on mobile phones. Naturally there is pushback, but with the way users consume news these days, the idea makes sense.

Well, this is a bummer. Lots of my friends worked at the Moscow Times and I’m sorry to see it go weekly I guess eventually it will end up in the dustbin of history along with the Bohemia Daily Standard, the Prague Post, the Budapest Sun and others that were all started when the glow of transparency and accountability seized the hearts of Eastern Europeans after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.