t0pz

i never made the claim that any large company relies solely on internet advertising for their income...?

We're not actually battling this issue, since technically it "works" for us. However, we do not know how much more uplift we potentially could get if we were to actively try to alleviate the mistrust & distaste for Ads, which i honestly do not know how we could. The only way i see it happening is by everyone in the Advertising industry to take quality seriously and try to make Ads as beneficial to both users and Advertisers alike. Unfortunately there are still plenty of money-farming Agencies out there who don't care because they get sent a large Advertising budget by a big client (ex: Nike or Volkswagen) with arbitrary goals like "bring us X more traffic or bring us X more sales) which isn't necessarily in either one's interest. The Agency just rakes in the money with minimum effort placed in the creation of the Ad (ironically, the image in the Ad is called a "Creative" when often times there is very little creativity used).

Re point 2:

I get where you're coming from. The fact is, that margins on ads are incredibly small. Additionally, the % of people clicking on an ad is understandably low. Usually you get a CTR of 0.3% to 0.6% which for smaller, unpopular content providers isn't much. However, it is often just about enough to make ends meet. The problem is that low popularity is not enough to make anything additional or to even call it a business. With lower popularity you are indeed better off exploring other options like Patreon or well-targeted sponsorships. However, i was mainly talking about SME - type of content providers. Those with 2 to 5 people actually working as a "business". In the end, everyone notices the repercussions of adblocking, but i meant who is actually affected by it so badly that it puts their existence at risk. The lone streamer or blogger will notice it, but for him/her its so low anyways that it doesnt make that big of a difference anyways. The medium sized teams notice it, and for them it might just cut away their small margins so that they are now in the minus and can no longer sustain an actual business. The large corporations/companies certainly notice it, but they can sustain themselves although they are the ones fighting back the most, since they have the resources.

aside from the fact that less than 2% of users actually do this, it is still quite arbitrary how they determine intrusive and non-intrusive. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt to improve on this. But the amount of trust given to Adblock Plus is ridiculous. They are a money-grubbing extortionist company that is in no way improving the advertising landscape at the moment. They are just taking full advantage of the fact that people hate ads and block them altogether, and unblock them for a big fee

github does not reveal the part of their code that is hosted on Eyeo's servers. While i certainly can't prove that they do, you also can't use their repo to determine what else they do in the background, leaving it up to "trust" again, as usual. Also, i couldn't care less about some headline. I would like a discussion, not e-pride

I totally agree with you on point 1 as i work primarily with non-intrusive ad formats with content that is as relative as possible to the user. There are definitely many "bad" ads and i hate them myself but there is a mismatch between what we perceive and what the data tells us. And this is often the case in Advertising. Consider this: You see an annoying commercial on TV about Butter over and over again, over the course of a month. These are quite intrusive and you certainly wouldn't want to see it again, if you had the choice. Some months later you find yourself in a supermarket with a huuge fridge with a wall of 50 different brands of butter that you never heard of. Whether you believe it or not, the majority of the people will subconsciously grab the butter from the brand of that annoying TV commercial. Why is that? There are several studies on the subject, but a common belief is that we distrust the unknown. This brand, albeit with intrusive, annoying ads has made its way into your "trusted" brands category in your brain. You wouldn't reach for one of the other 49 unknown brands just because you literally know nothing about them. My point being: These annoying/intrusive ads wouldn't continue running if they didn't work for the Advertiser. They are getting a ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) that tells them, it worked! This is the sad reality. I am in no way justifying that bad ads should continue to exist, but those are the facts.

I do still believe that we can change the Advertising landscape for the better though. There will always be bad apples who don't care as long as they get their revenue goals, profit margins, etc. It's kind of like the movie industry. There are a crap-ton of bad movies out there. I don't believe there's anything wrong with the movie industry itself. It's the individuals in that industry who create bad quality content. But this doesn't mean that all movies/ads are bad. What it really means is that the focus should be shifted to the good/useful/beneficial ads. In the movie industry this is easy. You got critics, ratings, etc. We do not yet have a system that properly educates, empowers and enables users to determine what is a good ad for them. This is probably due to the fact that everyone keeps saying how much they hate ads in general so creating a system to rate, control and criticize them sounds way too risky.

As for "good" ads, i don't think i need to point out the benefit to the end-user. A simple example is something like "price-alert" ads. You visit skyscanner for example and you search for a flight. You dont book it because its too expensive. A week later you see an ad for the same flight for $100 less. You click the ad, book the flight. This is the type of ads that i love. They bring value to the user and value to the company. Everybody wins. Make ads more relevant. This is the mantra in my business. If someone has been searching for a lot of ways how to train his dog, why wouldn't he want to see ads on "dog-training facilities in your area" or if you're reading an article about Red Hot Chili Peppers biography, why not receive an ad about their upcoming tour passing through your city? I see the value for both sides in all of these

"Acceptable Ads program" is a label that covers up the extortion of Advertisers & Networks. Also, if the USER were actually controlling/deciding what is shown and what isn't then i would have 0 problems with it. However, so far their practice of who/what they allow and what not is arbitrary at best. Im not talking about the automatic acceptable ads program. I'm talking about their closed-door deals that have been going on since 2015. Large sums of money crossed over to Eyeo's accounts from the big Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. to simply allow all their ads. Eyeo posted that they verify that these "agreements" are kept manually https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements HA HA HA. Any reasonable person who has ever worked with ad networks knows that manually monitoring ads is impossible. When looking at their Team, they certainly don't possess the resources to do this manually. Basically, they accepted cash for ads. Aside from all that, Adblock the plugin logs everything you do. From what websites you browse, to how long you spent on them, all the way to keystrokes. I heard they are even considering building a sort of Ad network since they have data on their users that NOBODY else can offer. I get the whole blind fanboy-trust for things that you find useful, but i look at people not at products. And Eyeo has been fishy from the start. I have no doubt they will do whatever is necessary to increase monetization on their tool. The guys come from the Advertising Industry after all.

Let me provide you with some insight into your bewonderment:

1) I work in the Ad technology industry and i can tell you with confidence that ads are far from dead. The human logic of "We hate it, so it must not be working" is understandable but condradicting the actual data entirely. I look at this data on a daily basis and i can tell you that Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years. They are also working for the Advertiser better now than they did 10 years ago, as we are able to track and measure much better. What people haven't noticed is the fact that they have become more native, less intrusive and more relevant altogether. I am not talking about your flashy ads that you encounter on your various pirating sites and other places that Adsense blocks to begin with.

2) Adblock: Adblock is a big scam. While the average user sees the value (just for them) they do not understand what it is causing and how it is developing. Let me enlighten you: First of all, adblock has destroyed a significant number of small bloggers, content-writers, and other publishers, as especially those were struggling to stay above water. On the other hand, one of the most prevalent Adblockers out there (i wont name) is now ironically making money by selling its Adblock space to certain Advertisers & Networks to show Ads (ha! ha!). This is literally the behavior of modern-day pirates. You have an economy of trade-ships crossing the seas, and then a pirate ship comes along, blocking your passage making you pay taxes/goods in order to carry on. Sound familiar? Yea... everyone loses, except the average internet user who won't care until all their content either a) disappears b) deteriorates in quality or c) becomes a paid service