Ask HN: What will happen when everybody uses an ad blocker?
As experts on technology, business and startups, I'm very curious what wil happen (technology AND business wise) if the pentration of ad blockers is 100%.
2) A segregation of sites in those who are okay at being free&ad-free (personal blogs, hobbyists, shops, corporate sites) vs paid-content sites. Possibly site owners will have a big need for functioning micropayments.
3) Migration of ad budget from banners&impressions towards sponsorships, paid placements and "advertorial" content/biased articles.
Id like to ad 4. search engines has to change, there will be room in that market to specialize in searching the ad-free sites.
With the current online advertising model, ad blocking will force publishers to take drastic measures that we as users do not want. We can shut down the ads, but the content will still have to be funded. We as users will still have to pay to view that content. Only in the future, instead of paying passively (by viewing ads), we will pay actively, being forced to deal with things like paywalls, freemium models, and subscriptions.
You can view our brand new report on adblocking here- http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/the-rise-of-adblocking/
- A violation of privacy
- Content creators' incentives are not for me the consumer. Important in editorial contexts
- An impairment of my computer systems, between another attack surface to being resource intensive.The Starcraft website Team Liquid also has around a 60% block rate despite actively encouraging people to disable Adblock on their site and having very minimal advertising.
Sources:
A League of Legends team manager on Twitch.tv Adblock rates: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1ewq95/totalbiscu...
And a Team Liquid admin: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1ewq95/totalbiscu...
2. Personal, targeted advertising rather than mass advertising. [Only you can see this: Why not try a holiday in Greece next year - it's cheap and the beaches are great, fantastic culture and the people are pretty easy on the eye.]
3. It will be as good as a cold coke on a hot day when adverts are in-place in content. Heck, you'll be paid by advertisers for including product references.
4. People will pay for some things that they don't pay for now.
5. There will be an increase in sponsored material. [This reply brought to you by Drupal. The finest CMS you will ever use.]
6. People will be paid to not have adblockers switched on. [Thanks for reading. Now click here for your $1 - news.ycombinator.com.]
Things change. Nobody expects economies to be static any more, do they? People will invent new ways or re-invent old ways.
Edit: Meh. Bad formatting. And added more ads.
When I used to run a website only financed with ads, I managed to make non-blockable advertisements with some PHP scripting. I think I included the picture on my server, named it something like a book.png and setup a bit.ly redirect with PHP. It all worked even with ad-blocks on. Not sure though have adblocks advanced a lot since then.
In some ways, it's the same as with comment spam: if you have a common interface or you're a large enough target, people will write code against you.
I think this would be a huge improvement, personally.
In real life, many of the people who are inclined to use an ad blocker are not the sort to click on ads anyway and are not providing advertisers with any significant revenue to lose. In fact it may save them a small amount by reducing server and bandwidth load.
I suspect that you would never see adblockers used everywhere as it simply isn't the case that everybody minds ads
However I'm still curious what people think would happen if the advertising giants had to dump advertising
This. I recently had an opportunity to chat with the CEO of a well-known blogging platform company and his attitude was that, first, the number of people who actually use ad blockers is much smaller than you'd think, and second, for the type of person who uses an ad blocker, you're not doing yourself any good by doggedly trying to put ads in front of them. If getting people to look at your site is one of your core goals, the fact that some of those people aren't necessarily going to benefit you directly via ad revenue is just a given. They can still benefit you indirectly by helping your site's popularity: enjoying it, linking to it, sharing from it, etc. In effect, "don't worry about it."
I don't think we'll ever get anywhere near 100% ad-blockers. I've never bothered with one and I'm perfectly happy with it. It's a somewhat self-limiting problem because I just end up avoiding sites whose ads are too obnoxious, so it's in the advertisers' best interest to reel it in to the point of tolerability. I suspect a lot of people are like me in that the ads are not enough of an annoyance to want to do anything about them.
You can read all about it here- http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/acceptable-ads-soothe-google-p...
Maybe I'm not typical, but I made my peace with ads long before the Arpanet switched to TCP/IP, and every ad blocker I've installed has been in defense from an impossible ad after running unfiltered for a while.
Maybe there aren't enough of us, maybe the temptations are just too strong for ad blocking organizations if they accept some, but I have to think there's at least a little hope.
I visited a small forum via a google search where I was redirected to a page "encouraging" me to disable adblock since the site runs on ad revenue. Of course, I abandoned the site.
There is already a wordpress plugin to detect adblockers [1]
Now, once sites start implementing these measures adblock developers will develop their product to circumvent these scripts. Content developers will update their script to break these new tools, adblock developers will update their tools to again circumvent the new script and the cycle continues.
Don't even think of paid for/subscription models because a large percentage of these sites know their content are not worth paying for so won't even bother considering it. They simply want eyeballs to attract advertisers.
There are already tens of millions of folks using ad blocking.
Anti-ad-blocking technology is not difficult to implement. OKCupid had nice messages asking for donations to adblock users. Reddit thanks users for not blocking ads.
I think that if adblocking grows, a system will come up where users pay a monthly fee to not see ads on content sites & that fee is distributed among the sites. Something like flattr I think is doing something like this.
I think this model could be implemented today if you could get several big media/net companies behind the effort.
The current state where Google pays AdBlock a whole bunch of money to unblock their ads isn't really cool - I think this subscription model would be a win for publishers, win for adblock (revenues), win for users (at least in developed countries, making payments is relatively easy/we're used to it & most want to support content/music/filmmakers,etc.!)
[Disclosure: I am the founder of the Epic Privacy Browser which blocks ads because they almost always involve trackers/tracking]
But that's a kind of ransom, and once established, the payments could only become larger. It would be like a government demanding tribute with no benefit to the payer, just so they won't invent a reason to throw you in jail. Oh, wait, that's already true. :)
Seriously though, if a pay-the-advertisers scheme were to be considered, wouldn't it make more sense to pay individual websites a subscription fee directly? That would be more efficient, and by being focused on specific sites it would improve the relation between quality content and income.
Obviously if a website had reliable subscribers, they could do away with the advertising. So could television and radio. I don't fully understand why this isn't the model, but I suspect it has something to do with people thinking they're getting something for nothing. But if we've learned anything from nature, it's that you only get nothing for nothing.
If you're on ThePirateBay or are looking up song lyrics all the time you have good reason to use adblocker, but most ads sent intrusive enough for the average person to care about. Therefore there is no need for a tech arms race.
Popups were extremely annoying and came with malware that was on almost everybody's computers. But I highly doubt Adblock will ever reach anywhere near that level of saturation.
Also, if you are browsing the russian part of the internet, you should block everything you can (ads, js, flash).
huh? what's that? a pop-under? did I turn ad-block off again?
2 days after their "publicity" campaign launched, things like...
"we have detected you using an ad-blocking service. Your wait time before this video plays has been increased"
...started to show up on various websites.
If "ad-blockers" become widely used, they will stop working effectively because the advertisers will have to make sure their ads are "seen".
We aim to educate the internet about adblocking. You can read more here- http://blog.pagefair.com
The Advertising Industry will finally wise up and realize that the consumers do not like having Ad's forced upon them interrupting their content. This will cause the Advertising Industry to Innovate (which is sorely needed, and good for business)
Online based Businesses will realize that Advertising is no longer an effective Business Model, which will lead them to charge for their content and/or services. Over time this will eliminate the concept of Freemium and reinforce the concept of paying for stuff (which is sorely needed, and good for business)
This is already being done with videos.
There's a very easy way to solve this problem for websites, and that is to host the ads from the main site. That would make it harder to track you across the web, but also harder for you to block content without braking the functionality of the page.
This in combination with how ad networks like The Deck works, with beautiful exclusive ads per page is the way to go.
It's not that simple. Almost all display ads are served through 3rd party ad servers like Doubleclick, Zedo, etc. because advertisers want the ability to:
- Control and change what ads they are serving without contacting hundreds or thousands of different site owners and coordinating mass creative changes. This is why ad networks exist. This includes controlling which creative gets served and optimizing for serving the best creative (ad + copy) when they figure things out.
- Account for frequency and reach correctly. By having a 3rd party serve your ads, you have insight across the web by "user" so you can cap the frequency. I don't want to hit you with 100 impressions per day so having global knowledge of how many times you've seen the ad helps eliminate waste.
- Account for impression based conversions / goals. You can correlate goal conversions on your own site with impressions and clicks so you can see if people who saw your ads but did not click behave differently than people who did click. This also gives you the ability to do multi-channel attribution so you can detect if impressions impact your SEM campaigns or do they increase direct-type-in traffic to your site, etc.
Every website would serve from a different domain, which prevents (? helps prevent?) tracking, but advertisers like myself can still run it through our own network and see valid stats.
I hate flashing ads, I loathe sound, I'm irritated to no end by ads made to look like news articles or any ad that breaks good page formatting for the sake of exposure.
However, unless browsers add ad-blockers by default I doubt we'll be seeing a future where a majority of internet users use it.
As far as the majority of the internet, ad blocking extensions are getting easier and easier to use with a variety of browsers. AdBlock Plus reports 50k downloads per day on Chrome alone and 100k downloads per day on Firefox. Adblock Plus is also the most downloaded extension of all time. The issue seems to have already become mainstream.
If you're interested, you can read more about adblocking in our new report here- http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/the_rise_of_adblocking...