Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news publishers that rely on advertising income tend to perceive users' adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the possibility that avoiding ads—which users presumably dislike—may affect users' online news consumption behavior in positive ways. Using 3.1 million visits from 79,856 registered users on a news website, this research finds that ad blocker adoption has robust positive effects on the quantity and variety of articles users consume. Specifically, ad blocker adoption increases the number of articles that users read by 21.5%-43.3%, and it increases the number of content categories that users consume by 13.4%-29.1%. These effects are stronger for less-experienced users. The increase in news consumption stems from increases in repeat visits to the news website, rather than in the number of page impressions per visit. These post-adoption visits tend to start from direct navigation to the news website, rather than from referral sources. The authors discuss how news publishers could benefit from these findings, including exploring revenue models that consider users' desire to avoid ads.

If service providers can identify reasons users are in favor of or against a service, they have insightful information that can help them understand user behavior and what they need to do to change such behavior. This article argues that the novel text-mining technique referred to as information-seeking argument mining (IS-AM) can identify these reasons. The empirical study applies IS-AM to news articles and reviews about electric scooter-sharing systems (i.e., a service enabling the short-term rentals of electric motorized scooters). Its results point to IS-AM as a promising technique to improve service; the data enable the authors to identify 40 reasons to use or not use electric scooter-sharing systems, as well as their importance to users. Furthermore, the results show that news articles are better data sources than reviews because they are longer and contain more arguments and, thus, reasons.

Cost-effective and high-performance electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reactions (ORR) are needed for many energy storage and conversion devices. Here, we demonstrate that whey powder, a major by-product in the dairy industry, can be used as a sustainable precursor to produce heteroatom doped carbon electrocatalysts for ORR. Rich N and S compounds in whey powders can generate abundant catalytic active sites. However, these sites are not easily accessible by reactants of ORR. A dual-template method was used to create a hierarchically and interconnected porous structure with micropores created by ZnCl 2 and large mesopores generated by fumed SiO 2 particles. At the optimum mass ratio of whey power: ZnCl 2 : SiO 2 at 1 : 3 : 0.8, the resulting carbon material has a large specific surface area close to 2000 m 2 g À 1 , containing 4.6 at.% of N with 39.7% as pyridinic N. This carbon material shows superior electrocatalytic activity for ORR, with an electron transfer number of 3.88 and a large kinetic limiting current density of 45.40 mA cm À 2. They were employed as ORR catalysts to assemble primary zinc-air batteries, which deliver a power density of 84.1 mW cm À 2 and a specific capacity of 779.5 mAh g À 1 , outperforming batteries constructed using a commercial Pt/C catalyst. Our findings open new opportunities to use an abundant biomaterial, whey powder, to create high-value-added carbon electrocatalysts for emerging energy applications.

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