Wellington, December 23 (JY&A Media) The publisher of one of the web’s longest running fashion magazines, Lucire, and the car reference Autocade, announced that it intends to move fully to non-tracking advertisements for its flagship sites during 2025.
‘I got into this line of work to provide information and entertainment to our audiences, not provide surveillance for multinationals,’ said JY&A Media founder and publisher Jack Yan.
‘Better late than never, but we’ll formally request that our advertising partners stop serving any advertisements with trackers in 2025,’ he says.
‘Clients who are happy to participate in less intrusive advertising, because they read the tea leaves correctly, are very welcome to come directly to us,’ he adds. ‘We’ll also happily deal with any ad network that doesn’t track.’
He believes that this way, the company can guard against the sort of scam advertisements that have plagued other websites.
Mr Yan says he is keen to prevent Google, Meta, Amazon, Bytedance and others from tracking his readers, but he is particularly mindful about Google as the biggest player in the digital advertising space and, as a consequence, one of the biggest trackers of online users.
Mr Yan says he has refused to deal with Google for many years. He has explicitly told numerous advertising networks that he would never sign any form from Google that connected JY&A Media sites’ traffic to a Google Adsense programme.
‘We’ve blocked [email protected] at server level so nothing ever comes from them. We have missed out on income as a result, but at the same time we have already protected a lot of our readers. In 2025, I want to go further.
‘Pretty easy when you think: who’s more important to me? Our readers or a faceless privacy-intruding corporation? I’ll side with our readers every time since they’ve taken the time to come to support us,’ he says.
Mr Yan says he first became suspicious of Google in 2009 and began “de-Googling” after a incident involving a friend’s Blogger blog that had been removed. The incident was so badly handled that it merited an article on Techdirt in 2010.
In 2011, he revealed that despite Google’s assurances since 2009 that users could opt out of their ad personalization, they were in fact opted back in the moment they hit a Google-owned property such as YouTube. Google’s technique was confirmed by the Network Advertising Initiative in mid-2011, which then pushed Google to fix its systems.
The following year, The Wall Street Journal revealed how Google bypassed Safari’s default blocking on Apple Iphones and planted tracking cookies.
Mr Yan covered his investigations carefully on his blog at the time, but stopped short of boycotting the firm when it came to his websites’ advertising, thinking he had little choice.
The firm also removed Facebook gadgets from its sites in 2018, weeks before The Observer’s exposé on Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter gadgets in 2021, months before Elon Musk’s takeover.
Inevitably, some networks that currently partner with JY&A Media have worked with Google and their surveillance-based ads have crept through to JY&A Media sites, so for the last several years, as an interim measure, the firm’s terms and conditions have instructed users on how to opt out of ad personalization and Google Analytics’ tracking.
‘I’m not against advertising,’ Mr Yan explains, ‘but I am against tracking when it isn’t welcomed by the overwhelming majority of readers.’
The arrangement does not extend to websites that license JY&A Media’s brands, which have their own contracts with advertising networks.
Notes for editors
Lucire and Autocade are registered trade marks of Jack Yan & Associates and subject to protection in certain jurisdictions. All other trade marks are the properties of their respective owners and are only used in a descriptive fashion without any intention to infringe.
Images
|
| |
Lucire website cover (full length), January 22, 2024 |
Autocade website cover (full length), March 3, 2024 |
About Lucire
Lucire, the global fashion magazine (lucire.com), started on the web in 1997 from its base in Wellington, New Zealand, the country’s first commercial online fashion magazine. In 2003, Lucire became the first fashion industry partner of the UN Environment Programme (www.unep.org). In 2004, it became the first magazine in its sector to extend its brand into a print magazine. In 2005, it became the first web magazine to be licensed as international print editions.
About Autocade
Autocade was founded by Jack Yan in 2008 as an online car encyclopædia (at autocade.net) after he found many existing references lacking in accuracy. Its contents, limited to a single-paragraph entry for each generation of a car model, are backed up by offline resources and painstakingly researched. It is often quoted by other resources such as Wikipedia. In 2023, a print counterpart was created to provide an informative, entertaining read to complement the original site.
About JY&A Media
JY&A Media (jya.media) is the independent publishing house behind Lucire and Autocade, founded in 1987 as Jack Yan & Associates in Wellington, New Zealand. Its main titles began online, Lucire in 1997 and Autocade in 2008, before their brands were extended into print editions, Lucire having taken what was an unprecedented path in 2004. It is also responsible for licensing these editions, with Lucire’s first internationally licensed print edition appearing in 2005. Its publishing activities are grouped under Lucire Ltd.
Contacts
Jack Yan, CEO
Jack Yan & Associates
T 64 4 387-3213
E information
@jyanet.com
###