Global internet ad spend superseding global TV ad spend finally. Ad-blocking as high as 26% in some countries (Germany) and rising. Looks like there is a battle for attention being waged, I wonder who will win...
Ad-blocking had already won. I haven't (involuntary) seen ads for several years now. There were a few regressions here and there, but they were all fixed extremely fast. The new fancy ad-block detectors were defeated in a matter of days.
26% ad-blocking is a nice start, but the real fun begins when it is at +96%, and Google/Facebook/InsertNameHere lose their main source of income.
I think a very strong and concerted push to outlaw ad-blocking is almost inevitable, but ultimately it will be as futile as trying to outlaw the BitTorrent protocol.
Will the ad-supported crap-manufacturing eyeball factory that is the modern Internet crash and burn, leaving only Patreon to stand atop the pile of ruins?
We can but hope.
It doesn't need to be eradicated, just kept underground to limit adoption. Millions use torrent, yes, but many more do not and the movie studios are still raking in money.
Is there any indication for such a push? What might get outlawed is paid unblocking, because that is arguably extortion, but free, non-commercial, browser based ad blockers will never be outlawed.
I think what will happen once advertising growth can no longer outrun ad blocking is one or both of these two things:
a) Commercial content producers move to unblockable platforms, i.e off the open web.
b) Google et al come up with a server side solution that creates trust between advertisers, ad networks and websites so that browsers no longer need to make blockable requests to third party sites in order to retrieve ads and send clicks. That would force any ad blockers to become a lot more resource intensive because they would have to analyse the content itself, which would slow down the page massively.
You don't really think it'll ever get anywhere near that percentage, right? When the major players start devoting time and resources to defeating ad blockers that's when the real fun will begin.
This would be an amazing development. 99.9% of the providers who switch to paid subscription will go out of business, because their content is toxic garbage that people will never click if it cost them money. The remaining will be those who care about quality and consider the viewers to be their customers, not their product.
Serious question. No intention to insult.
You are on the Internet, not sitting in a pub with no wi-fi. Instead of writing "if I remembered it right", why not spend 2 minutes googling, to find out how AdBlock Plus actually operates?
I totally get that podcasts have to earn money somehow, so I'm not mad or upset, but it has been an effective way of evading my usage of Ghostery and ublock / disassociation from social media.
I am not even American and I can also remember every single sponsor and product they've ever advertised.
Depends how long you've been listening to podcasts. There are lots of shows I listened to regularly for 3-5 years that I've completely stopped listening to because of the sheer volume of advertising (plus the fact that every week/day/episode the advertising is exactly the same). All TWiT Network shows for example are unsubscribed for me despite listening to about 10 of them and not missing an episode for years. So, in some older shows, saturation has definitely been reached. I think a lot of it is to do with necessary spending.
Podcasts are so simple to make yet people put together networks that have these high-end studios and camera systems when all they really needed was some guests, a few $100 mics and Skype.
Source: page 33 [1] here https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20170331_alphabet_10Q.pdf
[1] Page 33 in terms of PDF document, if you are looking at the printed page numbers then it is page 31.
Or use uBlock Origin, which supposedly has it integrated (I'm not sure, as I'm using AdBlock Plus)
Are you saying that there are ad-blockers based on image recognition?
Same with the Google search app.
> So ad-blocking still wins.
FB is losing all the way to the bank at the moment.
My point is that with adblocking tools being adopted by more users, ad platforms will perhaps begin to use this new format.
2013 $57 billion
2014 $66 billion
2015 $74 billion
2016 $90 billion
Facebook Revenue:
2013 $8 billion
2014 $12 billion
2015 $18 billion
2016 $27 billion
If ad blocking has already won, I'm sure Google and Facebook will be happy to continue losing.
But in the end if more blocking does not the ones that are not blocked just become more valuable so does not change really anything? I mean advertising is going to continue to grow no matter what.
So they will get more aggressive (we already can barely distinguish an ad from a post on most websites) and more annoying and more manipulative. And they'll keep crossing lines that will cause shit storms and ad-blockers will get more aggressive and more clever and more political.
Personally, I have big hopes for new models emerging where you pay a fixed, reasonable flat-rate sum once a month ($10 or $15) to access "premium" content across multiple sites. The reality is, from most higher quality sources, I read maybe 0 to 3 articles a month but there's dozens of them. I won't pay $10 to each of them, monthly, but I'd pay $10 to access them all. The question is just how to split the money. Most views? That would almost cause the same clickbait problem we have now. Some quality measurement (likes, upvotes, etc)? Would lead to pandering. If some company could come up with a smart way to solve this and convince a few sites to jump on board with premium content, I'd be in. It's a hard problem. Kinda like search engines...
Even if you're a paying customer.
I don't remember ever seeing ads mixed in with the main content. I think it was general practice to section them off somewhere else or put them in the classifieds.
Compare with: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2016/...
Then check out the parties sending js to your browser behind the scene. Apples and oranges IMO.
https://js.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/rum/wprum.min.js
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/ad/zeus/wp-ad.min.js
Looking at the output from the browser's console log on this page has me feeling like advertisers and analytics are a pretty gropey bunch. No means no, stop trying to touch my local storage!
I did product demonstration and sales for a couple years, travelling around to different venues and stores to sell a great product. As a result, I now have a nightmare scenario in my head based on the fact that if, while in the sales cycle (feature -> benefit -> emotional benefit), someone like me had a device giving "suggested" points to tailor my pitch based on the personal device of the person(s) being pitched (like for health: "cancer", "weight", "diabetes"; similar products purchased, hobbies, or really anything that allows a higher chance of emotional connection like insecurities, pride points, value system, all things that can be gleaned via content consumption and posting on the internet), my sales and closing percentage would be through the roof.
I might be suffering from something similar to Slothrop's anti-paranoia[1], but to me it seems like this sort of vision is where the current "advertising"-based model of the internet is heading and why a saner subscription model will not dominate without clear legislation.
[1] http://jtls.shirazu.ac.ir/article_201_cefaf62f0af6aa172e2b36...
The bandwidth caps at my grandparents' Delhi house being super-draconian (they're about as upper-middle/upper-class as you'd expect). Though I guess their cap (a couple GB) is in this middle range where it seems low from the perspective of video streaming etc (and I don't even really watch TV) but is high enough that ads aren't really presenting much of a problem. This would be in contrast to the presumably much-tinier caps (and correspondingly higher incentive to block ads) that mobile users are presented with.
At any rate, thanks for the explanations!
Disclaimer - I led the India section of this report.
Is that on mobile only, desktop only, or both? From your last sentence about Jio, looks like it is for mobile.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2015/511/
Presumably there's something similar on Android.
They would have no reason not to sell the feature of "better user experience" from blocking ads / trackers.
I use https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/purify-block-ads-and-trackin...
I use AdBlock Fast, but I say "use" casually since it's just an app you install and you're done with it. I never actually opened it after installing it months ago.
No more ads ever on mobile.