IAB Starts Publicity and Engineering Battle Against Ad Blocking
adage.com
adage.com
> The IAB's new group working on the problem will convene its first meeting next week, aiming to study and experiment with responses including a more clutter-free web experience, strict guidelines for the data that ads traffic in...
Even were the IAB to strictly prohibit trafficking in all tracking data, I would never trust any policy that says, in effect, "trust us, we're IAB and we won't track you, wink, wink". First, only a small subset of all Internet advertisers will hold themselves to IAB's standards (and like any cartel or wannabe cartel, members will defect). More importantly, advertisers and ad networks have proven themselves to be completely untrustworthy.
The Internet is a wild place, and ad networks carry the most dangerous threats the average user will encounter. Ad blocking is, most importantly, a means to protect ourselves. The superior user experience is a nice side effect.
Quite an understatement.
I will repeat myself: visible ads are the tip of the tracking/data-mining iceberg. Not seeing ads is not a sign that a site is more respectful of its visitors.
Found a pretty good example of this earlier today. See how there are no visible ads on the page, it looks rather clean, and yet see the amount of 3rd parties being pulled into the page[1]:
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/585534/10198746/6...
[1] this is the result of temporarily whitelisting the site to be able to see what it pulls in without a blocker.
What the Ad industry needs is a completely new and innovative business/revenue model, one that has not been thought of before. On the bright side, it's the dawn of a AdAge!
The Adblockers will lose horrifically. It will be worse than wack-a-mole, similar to the file-sharing industry's futile attempts to keep music free and shareable...
I now pay more per month for music than I did at any other time in my life, and I am becoming locked in to paying more per month forever. The music industry has won, they've replaced their old business model with one that costs us more while they take less risk.
Some people really dislike the idea of ads. They install adblockers. Publishers who make their living from ads respond. Who has more motivation, those who are vaguely annoyed, or those who lose their jobs and companies if they fail? The latter, of course. They will find a way around this because they have everything to lose.
I dislike the IAB, it's a force against progress within the ad business. But they're not going to lose horrifically, and even if they lose slightly it won't mean that you have won, just like with music.
I have the power over my browser. I won't consume ads.
Following that same hypothetical, you alone can dodge the bombs but most people can't, because let's face it - you're not colluding with others.
And unless you're up to date on bomb tech, even you are eventually going to get hit by a smart "ad".
Furthermore, when the OS vendors are putting ad blocking tech into their browsers, I no longer worry about the ad producers having the better tech. When smart bomb detection is built-in to the OS, all I need is an update and mom and pop can avoid the bombs as well as anyone.
The point is that you're extrapolating your intent and level of control to the rest of the internet audience, which you're not colluding with.
The ad-blocking at OS level is arguably even easier to detect than browser-based. It also doesn't stop advertising in apps, which is an example of how Apple is incentivized to keep advertising for it's own platform (i.e. Apple is looking out for #1 when it comes to blocking ads, not you).
If it gets to the point that sites are placing ads into the content themselves, I will likely end up sticking only to sites that are subscription or donation based.
Me too, but I don't feel that that's a win for the music industry, I see that as a win for me.
I didn't engage with a business model that didn't work for me, like millions of others; and eventually a business model emerged that I was willing to support. Maybe Napster lost, but I still got what I wanted, and it seems like the record labels did too.
Why would you assume the same thing is impossible for online publishing?
Sure you've got your go-to artists and albums, but music discovery is so much easier when you have an all-access pass to everything.
Same goes with the news - you'll always have your BBCs, Reuters, etc. but you also want to see something new and creative, which [probably] wouldn't have got off the ground if it required paid consumption models.
"Some people really dislike ... ads"? Lets be honest, Try "Most".
There's no subsitute for free speech and freedom in general, particulary in the way that one wants to consume content of anykind.
I agree the IAB is no match, but the corporate drones you refer to are Google and Facebook, both of which will cease to exist without advertising revenue.
Or do they want to track people who are using ad blockers so they can nag and bully them into disabling their ad blockers? Because that will end badly. People will eventually develop browsers which render 2 versions of the page, one showing showing ads that provides all results to javascript and css queries and one which has all ads removed for the user.
If that happens, they will lose any metrics they have on who is blocking ads.
So even people who speak at ad exec conferences use ad blockers.
The site says:
"Welcome to Your AdChoices, where you're in control of your Internet experience with interest-based advertising—ads that are intended for you, based on what you do online."
This isn't an alternative to adblocking - it's pretty much the opposite og adblocking.
It would be pretty painful for the online ad markets, as their effectiveness rates could easily be cut in half with a dozen people on their site that click every ad without viewing the results. So few people interact with ads, that a small cohort of 100% active users would overwhelm data with noise.
But, in the short term, you'd be supporting all the websites you browse until advertisers discover a way to filter out your false clicks.
If enough people do the same, without any formal agreements or informal collusion, you would all be able to get ad revenue without any one person having fraudulent intent.
The only way for an ad-provider to counter would be to insert in your agreement that you are not allowed to click on any ads, not just those that appear on your own sites. And then ad-blocking would become an ethical obligation for you.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/23/us-advertising-cyb...
Also, an ad never knowingly requested by a user constitutes theft of (Internet) service, so the whole ad industry by definition are law-breakers.