I first installed AdBlock in 2010. I’d like to say it was because I valued a more minimalist, streamlined internet, but that’s not really true. Or I’d like to say that I valued my time so very highly that I objected to having it stolen by banner ads, which is more, but still not very, true. The real reason was much more banal, because I just really enjoyed defeating the corporate giants in some small way. The idea of Subway desperately trying to get me to buy a sandwich and being utterly unable to reach me, was appealing.
Everyone has been aware of AdBlock for a long time. But it was a minor irritant that no one could fix, so everyone ignored it. The numbers instinctively felt negligible — when I worked in digital advertising, I can’t remember it ever being mentioned as a threat. This is no longer the case.
Most web publishers would be absurdly proud if their traffic charts looked like AdBlock’s Google Trends chart. AdBlock itself currently claims it has 200 million downloads, and this level of penetration seems to be supported by statistics from a number of different places.
Just Hank Green’s basic Twitter poll says that 50% of his followers are using AdBlock, which is supported by some of his own numbers.
Others publishers make estimates based on their actual analytics at between 15% to 40%, and there will inevitably be some large variations depending on both the demographics and tech-savviness of the audience. But at anywhere close to those numbers, creators are in an absurd situation. Few businesses could lose over a third of their revenue and be able to survive — it’d be equivalent to a newspaper giving itself away free on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, or a bar giving away a bonus two-thirds of a pint every single time.
Last week, PewDiePie blogged about the launch of YouTube Red, and concluded that his analytics said 40% of his viewers were using AdBlock. He also pointed out that YouTube isn’t making money. YouTube’s solution is to charge subscription fees to remove ads, and enticing viewers with exlcusive content alongside that. But PewDiePie also pointed out that his ardent support of that plan wasn’t particularly for his own good — that the money he is making already is, put simply, plenty. It’s the smaller creators that struggle.
If someone started a YouTube channel tomorrow, putting their heart and soul into making videos that people love, it will now take them much, much longer to to be able quit their job and achieve subsistence from the things that they make. 40% of viewers using AdBlock means that if it had previously taken a year to build to that level, it would now take twenty months. Instead of November 2016, they’d finally be going for it on their own in July 2017.
Nicole Cliffe, who co-founded The Toast with Mallory Ortberg, spent part of Friday night sharing and explaining the constraints they, as an indie site, have to work within.
The Toast’s ads are blocked by 25% of the people reading their words. It’s not a part of a larger company, and it’s not beholden to high-level editorial insight, which is why they can post complex historical satire, spectacularly original takes on art history, and unusual discussions on celebrities.
To build an interesting internet, there have to be sites like The Toast — eclectic, free, committed to publishing on as a wide a variety of subjects as possible. However, the only way to do that now is to revert to a system of patronage. The brief window in which ‘art’, for want of a better word, could sustain itself in a free market is seemingly gone. The Medici family has returned, but as a new, primarily corporate, elite.
Corporations want to make money by pushing themselves on as many people as possible. It’s the antithesis of what you need to be truly interesting online, where you have to be niche, but to be niche requires a degree of independence, and in a world where a quarter of your readers will never pay up, it’s essentially impossible to survive. The Toast actually does survive, independently, on a day-to-day basis, but outside those narrow parameters, a patron is needed, in this instance a family member.
Grantland was shut down last week. The scale and quality of its writing, and what it meant has been covered better elsewhere, but it was good and important, and it will be missed.
But most tragically, as Nicole Cliffe pointed out, it disappeared because it relied on a patron — in this instance, ESPN. Grantland lost money. How much it was losing, and how deep the hole was is both debated, and not really relevant. ESPN was needing to make changes, and it was planning layoffs. Large parts of ESPN’s online revenue come from advertising, and the ESPN audience skews older, so it’s unlikely that they block ads as aggressively as that of someone like PewDiePie. Yet if ESPN had been making 20% more advertising money across its online properties, it’s a reasonable assumption that sites that made “a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise” would not be the only ones that ESPN could focus on.
Grantland was never going to make money — it wasn’t that sort of site. It needed supporting. It probably did have slightly greater financial losses because of the impact of AdBlock, but getting full revenue wouldn’t have saved it alone. What might have would have been ESPN having the money to spend on it.
When the mainstream suffers, the niche goes first. The loss leaders, that bring credibility and interest, and diversify the stuff that a company is putting out, and improve everything else being written just by virtue of being near it, are also the pieces that can’t be sustained through tough times.
The influence of AdBlock on sites like ESPN is visible in a way you might not expect. The number of ad spots are getting relatively lower, which means the CPMs for those ads need to go up, so the ads need to be a better product to sell. Across the internet, this is why we now have vast splashes taking up an entire page, complicated panels jumping out from sidebars with inset media and overlays, and videos that load halfway down an article and dodge your frantic clicks to close them until you give up and leave the page entirely. It’s even why YouTube ads seem to be so much less frequently skippable these days. The on-site experience becomes almost intolerable, leading, slowly, to more and more people starting to investigate how exactly they can block these ads. Then CPMs need to go up again. And so it goes on.
We think we’re beating the corporations, but we’re doing the exact opposite. We think they’re gazing, frustrated, at their impotent attempts to reach the people they most want to with their offers, and they are. We think vast conglomerated sites with absurdist ads everywhere are staring at their engagement numbers in frustration, and they are. But they’re not the ones actually suffering. It’s the indie publishers, the off-beat verticals, the experiments under the umbrella of something much bigger and simpler that lose. The newbie bloggers, and the under-trafficked YouTubers. Everything you think is great is suffering so much more than everything you think you hate.
I stopped using AdBlock a few months ago. That took me a while, and ads are still annoying, even now. I wish they were less intrusive, and less tricky to deal with. But bills have to paid, and last week Grantland was shut down. Twice, they interviewed Obama.
