Ethics in content and advertising is a very big deal for us. Our apps have been around for four years, and for much of that we resisted a feature that allowed users to implement ad blockers. We used a custom, non-integrated web browser within the app, so ad blockers wouldn't work. We believed firmly that conservative sites needed and deserved advertising dollars.
A few months ago, after getting a dozen support emails in one single day about screen take-over "popups" in our app, we screamed "Enough!" We don't do popups, but The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller, and The Gateway Pundit would rather drive people away with obnoxious ads than serve conservatives, and we were taking the blame. It was costing us users, and we wanted to put an end to it.
So, we released an updated version with an integrated web browser, and we've been strongly urging our users to implement ad blockers on their mobile devices. We recommend the free version of AdGuard. With AdGuard installed, all the ads, trackers, popups and other harmful junk are gone, and websites load within milliseconds instead of minutes. It works across most all apps on your mobile device. Our app is faster, smaller, and we're not getting pelted with support emails from people thinking we're to blame for the screen take-over pop-up ads.
For a very long time we considered ourselves partners with conservative news sites, hoping to help them build their traffic. No longer. We're partners with conservatives themselves, and if conservative news sites want advertising dollars, they should deserve it by respecting my partner.
Perhaps the new vitamin ads posing as news stories on The Gateway Pundit are their response to ad blockers, but if they think that helps their credibility, their mistaken.
There's a compromise somewhere, but until one is found, we have to look out for our users, and we are. We hope that, someday, conservative sites will also look out for their users. That's not happening today, and so we have acted, by allowing users to choose to block their ads.