Ad Blockers Will Change How Ads Are Sold
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
This shows that they still don't see the big picture - that it's not just in digital media that ads have completely crossed the line, it's everywhere, from TV, radio and print, to billboards, jumbo-trons and corporate names on structures and landmarks. They are still clinging to the idea that they can go back to good times if they just reform some of their practices.
This is the end result of one group (publishers) relying on a revenue stream (advertisers) that destroys their own service and credibility. They still don't understand this.
I am pretty sure that they fully understand it but they can not openly admit it because that would completely destroy their ad revenues forever. Instead they try to get back to the good old days somehow because money from ads is the method which requires the lowest effort on their side.
There may be a little bit of hope in stopping the hemorrhage: making people that have not yet installed an adblocker to not do it, if they can paint the move as not really worth it. But even that is going to be very hard, so we'll see.
I've previously advocated for a different kind of reform. I want advertisers to start paying web users directly. Then web users can reward publishers with their traffic. It's not a perfect solution because it probably means that web users will still see advertising, but at least they would be somewhat compensated for it.
On the way up the escalators, we all commented to each other how the station felt considerably different to other tube stations. It felt better, nicer, more pleasant. This was strange, as the fit and finish is no different to other new tube stations. Eventually one of my friends realised the difference: there was no advertising.
I think we underestimate the mental load that advertising clutter causes us, even when it's merely in the background. We're so used to it that it's not until it's gone that we realise how burdensome it actually is.
I work in marketing / previously worked in more direct advertising, yet most of the time find adverts annoying. But not on the underground.
Otherwise I actively avoid advertising wherever possible – I haven't watched broadcast TV or commercial radio in years and block all the things online.
Interestingly, the other day I was on the tube and every single ad was for web-based services. No physical products or pre-Internet companies at all.
Perhaps because they are passive - you choose to view or not simply by looking at them or elsewhere.
Digital media is often a different mechanism - actively choosing to interrupt what you are reading or doing. Which causes the user behavior the publishers are struggling so hard to avoid - abandonment.
OK, Times Square is a special case, but it didn't seem to get much better elsewhere. Pretty much everything that could be held still for more than five minutes seemed to be sponsored, co-branded or had an advert stuck on it. I was surprised the pigeons didn't have little logos stuck on their wings.
I just could not get my head around the TV ads for medicines. They were some of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, beyond parody. One advert had an elderly couple laughing, drinking wine and standing around on boats, while a voiceover quickly listed all the terrible side effects of taking it. For about three minutes.
One page I looked at (the homepage of a popular dutch news site) has no less than six adverts on it, two of them animated and one a 'rotator', taking up a very large fraction of the total available space. Compared to a 1980's newspaper or a 2001 website that's absolutely horrific, all this besides the tracking and other implications.
So yes, it's gotten really worse, and not just a little bit. The creatives look better and the 1000000th visitor ads (that were spread through 24x7 mostly) were dumb but there are other metrics than the 'level' at which an ad addresses the audience.
I'm not saying you're completely wrong but you seem to remember the past through rose colored glasses.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/geocitizens-fume-over-watermark/
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208003328/http://angelfire.c...
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208014605/http://www.lycos.c...
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20000229043301/http://www.altavis...
[5] http://web.archive.org/web/20031012062202/http://yahoo.com
[6] http://web.archive.org/web/20010402054709/http://www.msn.com...
- popups that obscure the article after you start reading and scroll down
- campaigns that follow you everywhere
- advertising in the middle of the text you're reading, in the same font as the article
- entire articles written simply to be able to place a product or an ad (advertorials)
- pages on which 50% or more is taken over by ads
and on and on.
Really the web of 2000 was so much more innocent in this respect. Those 640x480 ads were relatively easy to ignore, usually above the fold and maybe a skyscraper along the side but that was about it. Irritating, sure. But nothing compared to being hounded by ads for a specific product because you once googled a particular term or that feeling halfway through reading something that it is simply an un-declared ad.
Btw, I host a copy of geocities today and it is entirely ad free :)
I refuse to have every famous person of the past and the present to be subconsciously linked to six letters of a brand name.
So I installed adblock. This is quite ironic, since Google depends on people looking at ads.
That's so contrary to my own experience, I wonder what evidence they used for that.
It's also interesting that they see the 'kind' of ads as a problem, rather than the industry and its way of applying technology as a whole. Ads are a bunch of payload requiring bandwidth (sometimes in short supply), cpu power (and so reduce battery life), waste the recipients time, have been used to spread malware and viruses and are used to track people and build profiles on them. None of those factors have anything at all to do with the content or the format of the ads, and each of those by itself is a very valid reason to install an adblocker, combined the decision is an absolute no-brainer.
For a day or so I used chrome (where I normally use firefox but that browser is currently occupied with a rather long running macro) and my chrome install does not have an adblocker. It's absolutely incredible how much worse the situation has gotten since I started using adblockers.
The advertising industry is the problem, not the ads themselves and I fail to see how they're going to get us out of this mess short of running into a very solid wall.
The fact that the largest advertising company on the planet makes a browser is telling, that may be in the long run the only way ads will survive, by being tied directly to a browser manufacturer which presumably will give them some way to force ads onto your screen. Personally I can't wait for the implosion of the advertising industry, sooner is better. Then we can go back to a web that 'just works' instead of this continuous barrage of commercial junk.
If the web were a radio station we'd be listening to 10 second music fragments interrupted with 12 minute advertising blocks.
100% agree.
Also, pretty sure I'm not the only one who has started boycotting a product only because it's barrage of advertising is annoying.
You're not the only one. In my case, I for instance decided to never use Groupon because of a barrage of pink and yellow ads I got once (before someone asks again - I'm pretty pretty sure this was way before I've heard any controversy about Groupon).
As if we should feel guilty about it.
We're a step or two away from getting internet content delivered as one giant .png file with the ads embedded in the page and an oldfashioned clickable map (remember those?) for links and advertising.
That's one way of delivering advertising that can't be blocked that I can think of.
Well at least it would be a bit more secure ;) but they won't do this. They'll first block users that use ad-blockers then they will just do some sponsored article with brands or just paywall their news sites.
Either way it's the end of ad networks as we know them.
That requires a website publisher to act against their visitors. Now, some websites will no doubt do this but they're signing their own deathwarrant with a strategy like that. The advertising industry is relatively powerless when it comes to adblocking, the first ad network that blocks access to the pages of the sites it is running on for users of adblockers will surely see a pretty steep drop in the number of websites they're still allowed to serve.
So only publishers have that power (and I'm fine with that, if they wish to force me to consume their ads I'm perfectly ok with getting my content elsewhere, it's not as if there is a shortage of content on the internet).
Adblockers are forcing a whole class of websites into a variation of the freemium model where the base service is free but only a small percentage is paying because they are still consuming ads. The bigger the ratio between free:paid users the higher the pressure on the remainder to monetize. This will in turn drive some of the remainder towards installing an ad-blocker themselves and so on.
This won't end well for the advertising industry, but it is self inflicted wounds for the most part. If advertisers had not structurally overstepped the bounds of the reasonable then adblockers would have never existed in the first place. Sloppy oversight on what ads they allowed to be served up didn't help either.
If they really wanted to fix this situation they could simply stop digging the hole any deeper.
An actionable plan would look something like this:
- immediately stop tracking and profile building, announce this very loudly and stick to it also in the future.
- strict oversight on the kind of payloads they allow to be sent out
- get rid of the crazy layering of the industry, stick to a simple 3 party model, publisher, advertising agency, consumer (this is a very complex step, agencies do not have the in-house knowledge required to actually serve ads) and take responsibility towards publishers and consumers for the ads served.
Lots of people would lose their jobs, lots of websites would likely go under but the industry as a whole would survive. If they can't make a move like this they are in fact milking the cow until it dies and die it will, their actions to date have only accelerated the process.
One of the problems that is hard to address is that the advertising industry is in an arms race internally, if one party starts using a new and even more invasive technique to outperform its competitors it gets all the business and this then results in adoption of that technique across the board.
And all this to (sarcasm mode on) 'improve your online experience and serve you more relevant content'.
Some do try, but then Google stepped in and told them that if you want to paywall stuff, get ready to disappear from search results.
> If they wanted to fix this situation they could simply stop digging the hole any deeper. (...)
> (...)
> One of the problems that is hard to address is that the advertising industry is in an arms race internally, if one party starts using a new and even more invasive technique to outperform its competitors it gets all the business and this then results in adoption of that technique across the board.
Indeed. This is your standard, garden-variety coordination problem. They are not able to execute your plan even if every single ad company was internally on-board with it - because they don't have a way to enforce coordination. Proliferation of ad-blockers may force them to by basically destroy their business model. Typically a government entity is another proven way, but it's hard to enact and enforce something like this on a global Internet sector.
Traditionally, I feel obliged to link to this excellent treatment on coordination problems: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
User targeting destroys the social fear of missing out mechanic -- nobody believes advertising affects them, but everyone believes that advertising affects the other guy. I have to pay attention to untargeted ads because anything they claim is something "everyone knows", even if it's a lie.
But once retargeting pulls back the curtain on the wizard the user realizes that the ads they're seeing are individually selected just for them. Digital ads drop from (pretending to be) a primary cultural information source to the equivalent of a pushy door-to-door salesman, individually lying to you.
But if you admit that all user targeting does is goose vanity metrics while damaging the value the ad inventory generates, most of the jobs in the digital ads industry evaporate overnight -- including most of the ad-adjacent staff at both the publishers and the brands -- so everyone is incentivized to keep the charade up.
That's what got us into this mess in the first place, we already had your model and it slowly got replaced by the one generating this backlash.
I've given up completely, no request to disable an adblocker is "reasonable" and there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad" anymore.
If a company dies because of adblockers, let the company die. That's economy.
I've never had an easier time finding great new music.
"... In a wide study to be conducted globally in the coming months, Google will try to ascertain what exactly motivates a web user to install an ad blocker..."
I have many friends who train people. We agree on some things and disagree on others. What I find among some of my trainer friends is that if I disagree with them, the problem must be that I haven't been "trained" enough. They use training to change the world. If the world doesn't look like it's supposed to, then time to do some more training.
Google are data folks. If their business model doesn't work any more? Must gather more data.
Why do people install ad blockers? If we could only identify the top 3 drivers, then make some kind of short-term trade with them to prevent this behavior (The kid of short-term trade that looks good in the beginning but sucks for the user later on.)? We can fix this.
We must be careful that we don't approach problems already knowing what the solution is. This is especially tough in an established and crazy profitable industry. If your tool is to give people free stuff while collecting data to present them with ads, when presented with a problem, odds are that your solution is going to involve giving people free stuff while collecting data to present them with ads.
Now let's hope they don't take a whole raft of publishers with them.
Clickbait forever!
The only way to end the arms race is to go back to simple display ads: you get a JPG of a fixed size on the article, served from the same webserver. No tracking, no javascript, no flash, no audio, no animation.
Hopefully it will be over very soon.
I can see multiple reasons why advertising like that is doomed to fail. First is the business model; pricing for performance is not an option. Second is the people; you gotta get rid of the nagging layer of incompetence/ignorance of the ones making decisions. Last, the more business advertisers are losing, the more they are using shady techniques.
In the end, better let the whole industry crash hard and fast, so we can build something better after.
Publishers cannot blame advertisers 100% for this situation.
As an advertiser, I tried several times to offer, less intrusive ads in exchange for lower CPM. Publishers never, not even once, would be willing to reduce their price by even a penny in exchange for friendlier ads.
I think without any irony.
We're at a point where ad blockers are used by a majority of the first parts of the audiences. The article and the talks it references all seem to be about how to slow down or halt the adoption of ad blockers so it won't get that to that point.
But we have reached that point already.
As the author states, we should be wary of most stated statistics on blocker usage. Neither the 25% nor 90% numbers he gives represent the global internet user base broadly enough for such an assertion.
Yet.
Ok. I guess if that meant urban young German laptop owners I was misinterpreting.
Audiences of content, in general, really aren't yet close to being a majority ad block users.
Of course, the trend will continue if media companies continue as they are or become more belligerent. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine a browser manufacturer partnering with / buying an ad blocker to install as default. Then we'll certainly see these majorities.
In this case the flagging is ridiculous and the moderators should ban the company IPs that the flags came from.
Censorship at its finest.