Let’s Get Real About Ad Blocking

With iOS 9’s arrival, ad blocking has been one of the hottest topics of discussion in the tech and media communities throughout social media. The common complaint voiced by publishers is that they are expected to lose a lot of revenue and will likely be looking for ways to make up that loss by charging for content or restricting it from users that are visiting with ad blockers.

The funny thing here is that the ads being blocked are basically useless anyway. The visitors of websites, especially those that have been navigating the web for many years, are tuning these out from the get go. More often than not, people clicking these ads are doing so by accident. Many brands are spending lots of money for useless impressions with no ROI. Anybody that knows anything about display advertising will tell you that the display media click through rates are beyond pathetic. Even more so are the conversion rates from those clicks. You will often hear some talk about halo effect from display advertising but what good is that halo effect when people are so sick of ads that they’re not even paying attention to them in the first place.

It’s going to be a rocky time for many marketers. We are going to see impressions drop, but is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. What I think is going to happen is the forcing of marketers to become more creative in how we get our messages out instead of relying on outdated useless tactics that are swindling brands and paying publishers for impressions that are generating little to no business. We will also see more social network advertising that feels very native to the channel continue to rise. It’s going to force a more authentic experience and really up the game in creativity that has dropped with display advertising.

At the end of the day, this is a good thing for customers. The mobile web has become atrocious to visit. Many of the largest publishers are its biggest offenders in the slowness of today’s experience. It takes a Thor’s hammer approach to create fundamental shifts in industry practices but Apple is one of the companies in the position to do so and is finally doing something about it.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out but I do not feel this is a conversation that’s nding anytime soon. The fact that two of the highest grossing apps in the Apple App Store are content blockers really says a lot for the frustrations that people have been dealing with the mobile web as it is today. Now it’s time for marketers and publishers to up their game, adapt or die.