Independent: "Can media make it on the darkside?"

The Ireland Independent asks Can media make it on the darkside? when discussing the dark net with Jamie Bartlett. In that article, Adland gets a mention as well as ProPublica.

Adland is the other website to go over to the dark side. It's a site dedicated to showcasing advertising creativity. Founder Åsk Wäppling told Drum Magazine that the decision to set up on the dark net was based on an increase in the number of visitors to her site using ad-blocking software.

She believes that privacy is now a pressing issue for her audience; they don't just want to block the ads, they want to block the data that's being gathered on them. Yes, you're right: it's more than a touch ironic that the audience for an advertising site is turned off by the ads and ad-tech on the standard version of the site.

Jamie Bartlett is the director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos and the author of the book The Dark Net. Like Adland's Wäppling, he believes that media outlets appearing on the dark net is indicative of the growing importance of privacy to users.

"The general trend is towards more powerful encryption and more serious consideration and care over people's personal information," he says. "A lot of the big technology companies are getting interested in this area. Apple's phones are encrypted and hard to crack into. And Facebook has launched a site on the dark net as well. So for me, privacy is not a tangent. It's where a lot of the future of the internet lies."