Internet users are increasingly blocking ads, including on their mobiles
economist.com
economist.com
I wish more advertisers would follow in google's footsteps, the full screen video ads are reminding me of the days leading up to the .com bubble burst.
The one thing from Google that I do block is advertising on YouTube. Just give it up and try something else already - why would I want to import everything that sucks about television/radio advertising?
So the guy who converted YouTube to a TV channel coated Google and all the publishers a huge sum.
I think they are trying payment based schemes. But for people who prefer not to pay - what is there other than ads and freemium[1] ?
[1]that's usually exchanging user advertising versus free service - but Google doesn't need advertising.
Which annoy(ed) you most? The leading ad-video or the banner at the bottom?
For me it's the second by far, although I don't see how the leading ad-video can have any decent conversation rate. Even with the best possible contextual placement.
Is it safe to assume there just isn't a good way to make ads work on a site like YouTube? 'Good' meaning what you described for regular AdWords (+Facebook) ads (text and display): being reasonably interesting/properly timed and generating a decent conversation rate.
The problem with the lead-in video is worse than a TV commercial, IMHO. On TV you go to watch a program, and the ads are an annoyance but you wait for them to be over and then the program starts at a fixed time, if you're not watching DVR, eg I usually watch a news program in the evening. But on YouTube, you make a selection of the video you want to watch next, and then instead some craptastic advert appears first. I don't understand why advertisers think this is a good way to reach people; yes, you get their attention by appearing as a surprise, but now consumers associate the brand with concepts like interruption and unmet expectations, before they begin processing any of teh semantic content of the ad. I frequently don't even notice what the ad is for because after the initial annoyance, my attention is fixated on finding the Skip button and counting down the few seconds before I can click on it. Many ads haven't introduced any product or branding by the time I skip away, and those which did so have already generated a reflexive mutter of 'Fuck off, Brand_owner!'
Now that I mention this, just thinking about previous Youtube ad annoyances brings several specific brands to mind, brands which I would otherwise feel neutral about because I've never purchased any products from them. Instead they're now firmly coupled with swear words. Think about that if you're ever considering a video ad campaign; the people who click out early are probably not just disinterested, but may actively resent your brand and your campaign might result in a net loss of business.
For websites as well as videos, I believe if the main content is showed first without any distracting elements and then the ad is showed at the bottom of a page or at the end of a video, I would not mind the ad at all and it would increase the likelihood of paying attention to the ad, provided I reach the end of the content.
But you would expect they tried everything and the current ads are the ones that work best. Which is a bit disturbing (and the base for my earlier question).
Yep. Stop the "in your face" ads, stop the tracking, and people are less likely to block the ads and the tracking. It is really simple as that.
I despite all ads that start playing videos, gif animations, etc. It distracts me from being able to read the article. I'm okay with Google Ads, it's purely text and not annoying. But the only reason I block it is because of the tracking. It scares the shit out of me when I saw something related to what I was doing on a completely different site on a different day.
Fuck that.
I think the parent wants a reasonable balance between effective ads and ads that don't degrade the content by being obtrusive.
I keep a spreadsheet where I add products/brands that have somehow snuck past my adblocker. I avoid buying from them altogether and will look for similar or offbrands.
I do have a few exceptions to this rule. If enough of my friends/coworkers can testify on the products behalf, I may purchase it because it seems to be a good product. If I already have purchased the product in the past and enjoy it and later see it in an advertisement - I already know I like and buy the stuff so it doesn't get added.
Imagine how fewer advertisements you'd see if more people kept a personal blacklist? :)
"But how will you hear about _____"? The same way anyone eventually hears about any great product: word of mouth.
Rather nebulous claim. And it's not clear that the second sentence is even talking about the same thing as the first.
It's pretty easy to quantify sales before and after something as simple as a billboard to show that there's an increase. Nielsen alone has done lots of in-depth scientific analysis on this. This industry is pretty advanced and uses lots of science and data, contrary to what you might imagine.
What is wrong with the 2nd sentence? Lots of people find what they're looking for through ads. They dont just have to be digital, simple things like coupons in newspapers still have massive reach and sales ROI. There's nothing wrong with it.
It works because of all the wrong reasons, in my opinion. Which is why I go so far out of my way to avoid purchasing things from ads.
The reaction from many websites is often to either more aggressively target those without ad-blockers - thus leading more people to turn to ad-blocking, or to switch revenue models - a risky and IMO often necessary step. Eventually the pool of people who aren't blocking ads will be a deeply suboptimal demographic - as noted in the article the majority of people who use ad-blockers are at least somewhat tech savvy, fairly heavy internet users, one of the prime targets for advertising online.
I haven't thought a great deal about this but it's very interesting to consider that through increased use of such software, perhaps end users can truly take control of how they are treated. There is absolutely no reason why advertising should cease to be a successful revenue stream but changes are undoubtedly needed to guarantee it into the future.
FWIW, websites which I visit frequently that are transparent about their tailored advertising and sponsorships gain much more trust and respect from me.
If you succeed, well good for you. If not, don't feel too bad - the cards were stacked against you from the outset.
In either case, the most important thing to remember is that Internet does not owe you a living. Nor does it owe advertisers an easy and easily controlled environment in which to operate. It has purposes that are significantly higher and deeper than hustling cheap, fast content while trying to make quick buck by selling your audience's personal details to fly-by-night ad networks.
Not everyone operates like this, of course. Google, Facebook, and BuzzFeed are all examples of places with far cleaner models. All they sell is access. None of them make information available to others. Indeed, they all guard what they know very jealously. And Google aside, they haven't been vectors for piracy.
But on balance, the Internet has been pretty terrible for people who work in the content industries, and the new media industries - in partnership with advertisers - have been pretty terrible for the Internet. You really need to go outside of this mutually debilitating flustercluck to find the truly awesome and wonderful things that the Internet makes possible. And many of these are things around which very good businesses can be built. For genuinely daring and visionary people, it's an extraordinary time to be alive.
Here's what's not visionary, or helpful, or beneficial to humanity: trying to turn the Internet into a cheaper, faster, dirtier, amalgamation of print and broadcast media, only with much crappier advertising and a large helping of surveillance and malware thrown in. You're not saving the world with that crap. Indeed, you're the bad money that drives out the good, and the sooner your business model collapses, the better off the world will be.
AdBlock on.
I think it's too late.
Ads have an irreparable PR problem.
As soon as users find out about the existence of Ad Blocking, they will simply enable it and never look back because they've been burnt by deceptive and intrusive advertising for far too long on the internet.
Whitelists, exceptions, even the very act of even thinking about turning off their Ad Blockers, are things that only principled, technical users will ever bother with, and we all know they represent a mere rounding error on the total internet population.
It will probably be a more fruitful effort to start exploring other alternative methods of monetization than to try to make Ads work again.
I whitelist pages I trust not to be abusive (reddit mostly). But, otherwise I don't care to serve an abusers interests any longer. If a site doesn't respect basic decency with their ads, I will impose that decency on them with an ad block tool.
"Monetization strategy" makes it sound good. It's not. If it's so bloody disgusting, it's a ripoff, not a business done in good faith. It deserves about as much respect as a scam.
It is possible to serve tasteful, malware free, silent ads. Most sites choose not to. I, and an increasing number of people are choosing not to view the invasive ads.
* Free, but with ads.
* Paid, without ads
No paywall, no annoying ads, and I still pay my share if I want to keep away from the ads.
What about ads like Facebook's sponsored content? Non-flashy, clearly marked as advertising, in the upper-right portion of the screen or something, so that I can read the text without getting flashbanged.
The requests I block are none of their concern.
If they want to charge me something, that's OK. If they want to have reasonable, unobtrusive, ads without tracking, that's OK, too. But, what many sites currently do is not OK. So, fuck'em.
You're conflating the ability to do something with whether it's morally right or not. Ad blocking will only hurt the long-tail and freedom of the internet that everyone currently enjoys.
Btw, payments arent exactly some kind of perfect answer. It will always cost more than ads and is no less private, in fact you end up giving up even more of your details.
This is the point at which you "blow out" their offer. You could say something like, "I don't think we're on the same page at all about the value of this good. I have to walk away if you consider that a reasonable offer."
The other party can counter with, "OK, what are you comfortable with?"
So, right now, in the ads vs. privacy negotiation I've said, "No. You're not even on the right page. You are asking an order of magnitude more than I'm willing to give you for this product."
They, of course, have the right to let me walk away. They can block me, if they'd like, and put such things in their terms of service. But, the fact is, they engaged in this first. The advertisers created this arms race, a race for the most tasteless, obnoxious, privacy-invading, and intrusive ads they could design. I am merely implementing my own disarmament plan and imposing it on them, whether they like it or not (they don't, obviously...but, again, I don't care; advertisers have destroyed any sympathy I may have had for them).
As I mentioned, I took years to install an ad blocker. I am willing to negotiate, but I gave them an inch and they took a mile. They didn't respect "do not track", they took steps to insure that I would be interrupted, even if I wasn't even looking at the tab where they're spewing their garbage with auto-starting audio ads (this was my personal tipping point, I had four or five of them happen in one day of browsing and decided "Never again.").
Advertisers did this to themselves. They have no one to blame but themselves. I don't know what comes next, but I've opted out of their system, and I'll continue to do so as long as the technology is used in the most nefarious ways possible.
The better way of walking away is to just not consume the content. That way the other side realizes their position is unacceptable without feeling ripped off.
I disagree with this (utterly and without room for discussion), and the courts disagree with this as well.
The content in question has been made available publicly on the open web. It is up to me and my browser to decide which parts of the content I download and look at. Further, I'm unaware of any site which includes in their terms of service that they require visitors to view ads in order to see the content (even without bringing up the technical methods of enforcing such a rule).
I strongly suspect that most sites with ads would rather people visit than not, even if they don't see the ads. I certainly feel that way about all of my websites (though admittedly very few of my websites rely on ads for their value).
"The better way of walking away is to just not consume the content."
Which I also do. But, when it comes to browsing HN and reddit and clicking links off to sites I don't know, I have every right to proactively protect my privacy and peaceful browsing free of intrusive/noisy ads.
There are many, many ways to monetize. Ad blocking doesn't stop them from making any revenue for their content. If the company in question still didn't realize that people don't like ads and any decently informed person uses an ad blocker then they are probably behind the times. Why would they rely on ads exclusively to monetize their content?
Relying on ads to monetize might have worked in the past. Adopt new ways to make money, the trend nowadays is to sell software and content as a service. That is much better than forcing me to view some gifs / videos / annoying ads or even text ads that waste precious space on the website.
Or, if the client won't run Javascript at all (and you might consider making your site require Javascript to render anything, just to stymie these users, if you're on this path already), you can still set a background-image property as a "default" for a banner div, in a way that it will never get requested if the ad does get rendered, but will get requested if it doesn't. (OKCupid uses this approach, if I recall.) You can then use that information just for analytics, or you can go further and change what the server serves that client from then on (i.e. make all further pages for that session return an error.)
The industry simply disregarded the opportunity Adams recognized and just moved what we all hate from paper media to the Internet. However, in the Internet we have a tools we can use to defend ourselves. It's really no wonder that we, users, increasingly reach for them and it's only a stupidity (and/or greediness) of ad companies that prevented them from predicting that.
I don't know why nobody can figure out a workable, voluntary microtransactions model. If you like a piece of content instead of (or in addition to) upvoting or "liking" or retweeting, you send a few pennies to the content creator.
The model now is simply people not savvy enough to install ad blocking subsidizing content consumption of everybody else. That is probably not stable.
Or people who are plenty savvy, but simply don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...
>don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...
The current ad economy favours clickbait over original content.
Paradoxically, there's a lot more original content than there used to be in the days of print. But that's down to Wordpress and the low cost of entry to web publishing, and not so much because there's an infinite number of content monkeys trying to monetise an infinite number of articles of the Twenty Things About Hacker News You Just Won't Believe kind.
As far as I can tell, that's way more money on a per user basis than companies are making on selling ads.
I serve myself a blank ad.
There seems to be no midpoint where the sites get the money they want or need that is also going to be acceptable to the consumer. Advertising, for some reason, does pay enough.
Every time a site has tried a paywall approach, it's met with backlash and a huge decrease in users. Only some of the top publishers have been able to monetize this way.
Micropayments have been tried and even Google is on it's second run with the Contributor program but it's still proven hard to get anyone to sign up.
When the alternative is to just install adblock, why try harder or pay money? Users are just as greedy as anyone else, free will always be the biggest draw.
So many people want quite a few things for free while at the same time so many also immediately agree the creators of those things should be appreciated/respected/supported.
Take a random well respected journalist: people will often want to read his/her stories for free at the very moment they are released, while those same people overwhelmingly want the journalist to have all possible opportunities to continue their work (financial backing being a large part of that).
I have absolutely no experience in sociology/psychology, but I think it is fascinating.
Cost has time and again been proven to be an extreme obstacle vs free and people will go to great lengths to acquire stuff without paying (ie: piracy). When it's as easy as a browser extension, then it's tough to see a way out.
This is something that would need massive cooperation and integration between websites, ad networks and even ISPs to get right. If it was that easy, the industry would've already done it. The fact that Google is on it's second approach with their Contributor program and still not finding any luck is telling. (And Google owns a ridiculous amount of the layers in the modern web so they're probably in the best place to pull this off).
Give me a browser extension that completely blocks all sites that don't want me to visit since I'll be blocking their ads.
My problem with adverts is that they are not information, they are selective truths or downright lies. I cannot trust adverts.
Roughly, the whole idea of free market economy, a.k.a. capitalism, is based on theory of rational behavior of participants - and also on assumption of complete information about the matters which are being decided.
Advertisements heavily change that last assumption (lies, selective omissions or inclusions), so much that the whole system doesn't work as expected. Game-theoretically, everybody incentivized to advertise his goods, while together we make market working worse for everyone - conflicting goals. I wonder if there are theories modelling this state of things.
Quite the opposite in fact. It allows for and can easily withstand significant irrationality among participants, while still producing vastly superior outcomes. The 19th century in the US more than proved that fact; by ~1910 the US was embarrassing every major economy of Europe in terms of median incomes, growth, wealth production, etc. The free market results in an economy with far greater flexibility across the board. It can absorb shocks from irrational behavior better than any other system. The more distance you get from the free market, the harsher the penalties for irrationality: just ask all the Socialist, Communist, and Fascist systems of the 20th century.
The free market system has no opinion on the behavior of individuals, that's a relationship that exists among people and not with the system itself. In actuality there is no "free market" that you're interacting with, such that it punishes you for being irrational, there are only other people with economic interests of some sort that may take advantage of your irrationality.
Reputation is the answer to your last issue with the free market, regarding both advertising and complete information. Nearly every economic structure in any market system depends on reputation, and even more so in the free market. The free market doesn't require instant or perfect information, or expect participants to possess such god-like powers - the free market runs on eventual consistency, eventual recognition of reputation. Over time customers will come to know you as either honest, or dishonest, and they will vote with their money depending on the grievance.
Try running a typical business in a free market, lie to your customers non-stop, over-charge them compared to what you advertise, and see what happens to you. Your reputation will destroy you over time. This happens every day to businesses of every size in every city in America.
Considering that, it's absolutely no surprise that native advertising is becoming so popular on platforms targeting the 18-36yo demographic. This is where Snapchat hopes to start making big money. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Reddit is cashing in on this already.
As much as we hate waiting 5 whole seconds before a YouTube video, I think it's much less sinister than having brands shoved into your subconscious.
But this is the internet we've created. I think that we'll solve it with time.
I'm still not apologizing for using my adblocker.
That's something worth doing in the GNU fork of Firefox. From within the browser, you can do ad blocking and pop-up blocking more successfully. Add-ons currently do it as an after-the-fact change to the DOM. With better browser support.
As ad-blocking becomes more widely used, we may see a decline in clickbait sites. No loss there.
1) There are only two viable business models for digital publishers - free content with ads, or paid access. Yes some can survive on donations and ecommerce, but those are exceptions. Direct paid models also only work for some very large and high quality publishers, the long-tail of great small sites only exists because of ads.
2) The main reasons of adblocking usually are performance, security and privacy. Performance is a given, loading less means loading faster. Security is definitely a problem along with privacy, but mostly because this is a global industry that has largely gone without any real regulation. Things are slowly changing but a few bad actors have ruined a lot of trust by coming up with increasingly intrusive formats and allowing malware on their networks from shady advertisers.
3) Blocking ads absolutely does hurt publishers. It's not fair nor "right". It might not be illegal but just because it's easy to do doesn't condone the usage. Lots of sites have terms of service where they explicitly state the content is available in exchange for the ads. The fair choice would be to not visit the site if you don't find the ads acceptable, a choice that has always existed. By visiting with adblock, you are showing that you find value in the content but don't want the publisher to recoup the costs of production.
4) Going forward, advertisers are getting better with less intrusive formats and better security. Regulation is also finally appearing along with things like fraud and viewability tracking. This should all help, but it's a long road. The other option is micropayments but this isnt as easy to solve (needs massive scale, partnerships with sites, perhaps ISP help, etc).
Overall: ads work, it's a giant industry, adblocking does improve performance, security and privacy but costs the publisher and does endanger the wider web of original content. I don't agree with using adblock but I do consider the reasons valid and that its at least pushing for a better industry (and perhaps future model).
Edit: Downvoters, what exactly is the issue? Interesting that anyone advocating that adblockers aren't an absolute good thing gets dismissed here on HN.
"There are only two viable business models" - and then you admit a third, and a fourth, and claim that they are exceptions. There can't possibly be a fifth? There can't be a sixth that someone will invent next year and become the dominant mode of funding digital publishing?
You claim a moral right for web sites to show you ads, but no equivalent moral right for people to use programs to ignore the ads. That's inconsistent, and also morally abhorrent to many people.
Finally, you say that you "don't agree with using adblock but I do consider the reasons valid" -- that appears to be another inconsistency. If ad blocking is immoral, there can't be any reasoning which will overwhelm your moral objections.
Perhaps you are using the word "moral" in an unusual fashion?
2) Both options in a moral argument cant be moral. I don't think it's moral for people to use programs to tamper with what a content provider has given you in exchange for providing that content (which they have full rights to) for free. The usage of the programs isnt the issue, it's what and how it's used for. Modifying a site to make text bigger is fine for example, modifying it to circumvent the advertising explicitly is morally wrong.
3) The reasons why people want to block ads are fine. Most people want more performance, security and privacy. Adblock and it's blunt approach of blocking everything as well as the extortion businesses run by the adblocking companies is immoral. Wanting something and doing it are different, as well as the method. I'm arguing that adblocking as a method is wrong.
4) I'm not sure what other word I could use... it's based on principals since it's not law or hard rules, unless you count breaking terms of use on sites. But it seems nobody cares about those so morality seems to cover all of it.
It's not inconsistent. People have a right to ask for whatever they think their product is worth. And people have just as much as a right to turn down the deal if they find it unacceptable. But people do not have a right to just go ahead and consume the product if they find the asking price unreasonable. The latter seems more morally abhorrent to me.
The internet, as it existed before ads, has shown this to be false. As has Wikipedia - an ad free site which displays the writings of millions of individuals. Oh, and book authors - they run sites without ads, and frequently even post web-first stories, supported by following them with e-books purchased by their fans.
> By visiting with adblock, you are showing that you find value in the content but don't want the publisher to recoup the costs of production.
Personally, I'm showing that the producer has lost all of my trust that they can pick ads which are appropriate to their content. Most web site owners are lazy when it comes to ads - they just allow through whatever the ad company wants to put up. It devalues their site, and the fact they don't notice this indicates their lack of respect for me as a consumer.
> advertisers are getting better with less intrusive formats
Not in my experience. Full page interstitial ads, inter-article highlight ads, auto-playing sound and movie ads, ads for crappy Clash of Clans clones advertised by busty, half dressed women... it's as bad as it ever was.
> ads work
No, they really don't. The payout per impression has been going down for years, as more and more companies realize that ads just don't work (regardless of the fraction of a percent of people who block them). The only reason ads are still viewed as a remotely viable model is because the ad sellers are lying to the people purchasing ad impressions.
"Look at all of this (bot) clickthrough on your new ad on Facebook! How about all of these impressions (from click farms in China)! Now how about buying another 200,000 targeted impressions? What do you mean you didn't get any actual purchases from the previous 200k? You're just not realizing how much value you've gained from being in front of people's eyes. That's another $2,000, please."
Could I stop viewing sites which use ads? Yup. Should I? Hard to say. Perhaps I'm nostalgic for the old days where content was made freely available for the sake of being available, perhaps I'm just being vindictive against those who have displayed no respect for me. Either way, I'm not going to stop browsing the web because someone wants to make my eyeballs bleed for an insignificant fraction of a penny.
Instead, publishers will blacklist certain advertisers but for the most part it's very automated based on context, behavior targeting, and other factors. Also even if a publisher is large enough to do direct deals, they still use the networks to "backfill" the remaining inventory because they would rather make some money than nothing.
With the cost of hosting going down and the growth of blogging platforms like wordpress, medium and others, it's becoming much easier for the long tail to publish. Still hard if they want to actually make money but at least they can publish without a problem today. I'm glad for that progress.
Arguing that ads don't work though, I just dont get it. What are you basing this on? The entire industry has increased by billions in spend, cost per impression is falling because there's so much more inventory and the shift to more performance based pricing. There are still triple digit CPMs depending on the placement + audience + format so it's not like everything is super cheap. If it's some crappy clickbait link running on some shady site, yea it'll be cheap. Buying ads on FT.com is very different.
Ad fraud is a problem sure, the same as fraud is a problem in credit cards. It's just a constant arms race. It's not like the industry is stupid. Please stop thinking that all of the very talented engineers, data scientists and analysts dont know anything. This industry is far more hard data-driven than many others where "gut" powers lots of decisions.
Edit: Side note: I know people hate clickbait headlines and all those crappy gossip articles... but guess why they're always around and sites like BuzzFeed are worth a billion? Because that's what people actually click on and read.
Also book authors: Their main business is not the website. In fact the website is a giant advertisement for their actual main business, which is books. This discussion is clearly about websites whose main business is producing online content.
How many online content sites do you know that run on alternative monetization methods like donations? Now how many sites do you know that run on ads? You'll find numbers will not support your view.
When you weed out bot traffic, unviewable ads, and arbitrage, your engagement metrics and ROI basically go off the charts. And there are a couple of firms that help digital advertisers do precisely that. e.g. http://enbrite.ly (Disclaimer: I work with them.)
I think ads are very important for keeping the internet free like it is now.