Can “Acceptable Ads” solve Adblocking?
What I learned by attending the #CampDavid Roundtable Discussion with Adblock Plus on November 3, 2015
As I (and many) predicted, when Apple released iOS9, the concept of adblocking became a mainstream topic, at least within the nexus of the interrelated industries. The New York Times quoted me on the subject where I may have helped introduce everyday readers to the terminology of “whitelists” which have the effect of unblocking certain blocked ads or websites while using an adblocking tool. Perhaps this has contributed to my reputation with having some expertise on the matter. That and my Twitter and my Medium, so yes, I’ve been obsessed, and yes, perhaps Medium doesn’t need more hot takes on adblocking, but the meeting last night was perhaps simulating or prototyping a future “Acceptable Ads Advisory Board,” so keep reading for new developments.
When Eyeo GmbH, the company that owns the world’s most popular adblocking software, Adblock Plus, set out to convene the ridiculously named roundtable #CampDavid in order to open up “peace talks” among publishers, advertisers, and adtech with the agenda to explore support for their proposed notion of “Acceptable Ads,” they reached out to to me for an invitation. Both heads of the major premium publisher trade group, DCN and adtech trade organization IAB, Jason Kint and Randall Rothenberg, respectively, did not accept their invitations. Jason Kint respectfully articulated his reasons in the spirit of transparency and clearly expressed what it would take to get him to the table (spoiler: full transparency or we’re out).
For those not yet following this story, “Acceptable Ads” is a program that Eyeo has been running since 2011 that allows advertisers and advertising networks to pay undisclosed fees to become whitelisted for their 200M Adblock Plus users. New iOS9 Content Blockers have partnered with Eyeo, including the popular Crystal. Indeed, Adblock Plus actually does not block ads per se, but rather, only the ones it deems unacceptable. Visit their homepage and it tells a different story about the product until you read the language as carefully as an attorney wrote them.
What constitutes an “Acceptable Ad?” Does anyone agree on these criteria? Eyeo’s thinking seems closely in-line with new proposals emerging from the IAB, called LEAN (Light, Encrypted, AdChoice Supported, Non-Invasive Ads). These are the preliminary Eyeo drafted definitions of an “Acceptable Ad” or AA:
- Advertisements cannot contain animations, sounds, or “attention- grabbing” images.
- Advertisements cannot obscure page content or obstruct reading flow, i.e., the ad cannot be placed in the middle of a block of text.
- Advertisements must be clearly distinguished from the page content and must be labeled using the word “advertisement” or equivalent terms.
- Banner advertisements should not force the user to scroll down to view the page content.
Sounds like a step in right direction at first. However, peer reviewed research by Robert J. Walls et al. (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University) presented at the SigComm conference this year, offers rigorous evidence that the AA model is problematic for several reasons. These include:
- the whitelist is growing rather quickly and with limited transparency (at what point will it become pointless to install their blocker?)
- a somewhat dubious set of advertisers have made it through the blockers onto the whitelist already (such as 2.6M parked domains) which seem to be the very type of ads users hope to block (At what point do bad actors spoil the whitelist if they haven’t already?)
- although privacy is a feature touted by Adblock Plus, tracking by whitelisted companies includes Google and so trustworthiness isn’t assured, nor is Do Not Track supported (Industry prefers to downplay privacy as a primary issue but it’s a huge concern for people of all ages and the data supports it, 50-90% agree. The incentive to ignore this data is quickly unwinding into inconvenient truths that adblocking can’t be solved without fixing this first.)
- data suggest there is insufficient agreement on what ads users would find acceptable (This could be the crucial dealbreaker because it’s based on a flawed premise that an “advisory board” of industry nerds determines something that users have already proven they are the ones that now get to decide and industry must adapt.)
- transparency of the governance of the whitelist is cited by researchers and industry representatives alike as a significant issue that might be unresolvable based on my observations at the roundtable (More on that later…)
Adblocking is a cybersecurity issue
Given the fact that Google is whitelisted, this means that the largest advertising company in the world isn’t generally adblocked. According to a newly published paper by Timothy Libert (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) for the International Journal of Communication, October 2015, we can dig deeper and further past Walls et al. to uncover a shadow web. It exposes Google’s privacy practices as highly problematic. In fact, 20% of the 1M websites Libert’s research surveyed load adtech software susceptible to NSA surveillance techniques as exposed by Edward Snowden.
On those grounds alone, “Acceptable Ads” are unlikely to ever be acceptable to privacy advocates. Should the EU and eventually the FTC in the US sort out shifting privacy regulation issues and normalization across the regions, AAs will be anything but acceptable as long as they subject us to mass surveillance. Even the AA issue itself is already recognized by the US military as a cybersecurity issue, as the US Army Reseach Laboratory Cyber Security funded the Walls et al. study at Penn State.
Advertising is dead. Long live advertising.
Given that some notable sites are reporting 50% adblock rates, the worlds of advertising and adtech need to be asking themselves, at what point do they accept that tracking is pointless and destructive? The sample is now skewed by blocking rates that range from 10–50+% and vary widely across demographics. The data are now deeply flawed in aggregate. The FTC is opening investigations into how personally-identifiable individuals are tracked across devices. It’s over. Big Data has failed massively. If it had worked, the marketing dashboards would have measured the market and they would have seen this coming (Searls). We’re back to the old adage:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” — John Wanamaker (1838–1922)
It’s critical to emphasize that here in the 21st century, adblocking does not harm advertisers very much at all since they do not pay for blocked ads. They lose behavioral data that proxies for market research but the perverse incentives of trackable advertising ensure that publishers bear the brunt of devastating losses. Cutting out the middlemen and selling direct would allow publishers to offer the kind of targeting that once sufficed. Market recalibration could manifest itself as a repricing for access to precious audience attention that publisher’s still own. It might appear to a spreadsheet that viewers and readers are vanishing, but that’s the side-effect of trackers being vaporized. If enough industry players decided to take cover behind the “Acceptable Ads” whitelist, some semblance of audience auditing is preserved otherwise obliterated by adblockers. This assumes an equitable governing body for the whitelist is feasible.
Shared Governance is harder than Twitter
Coming from academia, I know a thing or two about the notion of shared governance, that a body of stakeholders can participate in the governance of an institution controlled by shareholders. It’s a constant battle and you have to be really good at it to even begin to succeed at managing the power dynamics, even in the best situations. Usually, the stakeholders are marginalized and demoralized and it takes strong leaders to rally a political movement to effect meaningful change. If whitelists will be managed by such a committee, it’s difficult to imagine how it wouldn’t eventually become corrupt, dysfunctional, or ineffectual to manage future disruptions.
When asked about governance issues, Eyeo doesn’t respond to suggestions of forming a non-profit or B-corp structure that could resolve its obvious conflicts of interest, but would it then have a profit incentive to even bother? They’re blocking that discussion and it hasn’t been whitelisted yet.
Signals vs. Cudgels
When asked if a header-based solution rather than a whitelist/adblocker solution could be the preferred implementation, Eyeo makes oblique comments about privacy and security risks as it tries to dance around the issue that a standard HTTP request header, like the Do No Track standard, would mean that anyone could support an “Acceptable Ads” standard, and so they would have no market advantage. So like most issues related to media and technology “at scale,” it comes down to who wins the monopoly and how everyone else loses out.
The adblocker is a cudgel that inflicts mass damage as its users wield their power toward re-enfranchisment at all costs. The whitelist is a classic hack. The Internet was designed to handle headers and response codes as a basic architecture of the messages that weave their paths around the world in an instant. As I’ve said on a podcast, Do Not Track could have and should have been the solution before we had a problem. As emphasized by Libert, the number of companies that support the Do Not Track standard, the equivalent to a Do Not Call registry for the Internet, is too small to consider an adopted standard. However, Twitter and Medium should be applauded for their committment to honor the standard. It’s a big reason why I’m comfortable associating my reputation with their brands. We should remember that against the competition of Google, Facebook, and an army of other bad actors, not supporting DNT, it makes Twitter’s job of monetizing us that much more difficult.
What’s the solution?
Is it Adblock Plus paid whitelisting? That depends if Eyeo manages to establish a sufficiently transparent, autonomous, governable — acceptable — entity to manage the whitelist. From there, it depends on whether or not Eyeo’s 200M users will stick around because they all agree that the ads are acceptable or flock to another product or solution.
Is it Do Not Track? If the FTC, along with the US and EU governments had the political teeth and will, this standard could be mandated and the industry could let go of it’s laughably pathetic attempt to self-regulate. It’s surprising they don’t want a clear regulation to build upon and eliminate uncertainly. They still cling to the myth that targeting is even neccesary, let alone viable anymore. Facebook and Google will track us like crazy until we say no in legal code, not just source code.
We’ll also need a button on the browser to switch Do Not Track on and off. It shouldn’t be opt-in or opt-out, but just a button, absolute user choice, just like reload and go back. Privacy controls should not be advanced features. They should be fundamental controls. Privacy is not just the right to keep a secret. It’s the right for us to be reasonably unobstructed from constructing our own identity. Teens get it. Grown-ups don’t, yet.
Is it monopoly? Facebook, if we let it, will swallow publishing, advertising, adtech, and the audience in one gulp. This is the worst-case scenario. Google has been busy being evil when it comes to honoring the true meaning of privacy and data rights. It’s a dystopian future where we lose our freedom to massive corporations. We all know it. Someone came up to me after the #CampDavid roundtable and told me I had unplugged them from the Matrix with my talk about Big Data as an illusion that caused 200–400M adblockers to be installed. If Adblock was a Valley variety startup, it would enjoy a unicorn valuation with those user numbers.
Is it micropayments? News is a commodity and among the most difficult products to sell. The Internet is free as libre but not always free as in gratis (Stallman). This distinction, like a simplistic understanding of privacy, will continue to cause confusion between creators and consumers of professional-grade content. We haven’t tried most models of paying for content, so given the condition we’re in right now, it seems unwise to write any alternative off without putting a sincere effort into trying it first and letting it fail if necessary, so you can say we tried it. Have we tried using HTTP headers to solve adblocking and adblockblocking by supporting ad-free content micropayments?
Is it a network of trusted ad networks? The adtech infrastructure is absurdly complicated and crumbling under its own weight. In parallel to Wall Street inventions such as the Credit Default Swap, the adtech ecosystem is vulnerable to fraud, waste, and perverse incentives that self-destruct and take out immense collateral damage on the way down. An alternative to massively complex networks, would be small, private, pre-targeted ad networks, such as The Deck, which don’t do targeting and don’t need any criteria for acceptability. They’re just about as perfect as they come. Imagine a hundred versions of The Deck for every audience of affinity that advertisers might like to reach in a receptive, warmly welcoming manner.
Is it VRM? The destructive dashboard marketing tools that helped to cause the adblocking crisis have no companion platform for consumers. There is no CRM-to-VRM interface (Customer Relationship Management to Vendor Relationship Management). There are dozens of startups that are building a next wave of products that aspire to comply with the principles of data sovereignty, consumer intentcasting, and signalling for ads when we’re ready for specific messages, and where we set the terms. Doc Searls has been working on the solution to adblocking for awhile now because he called it. “A free customer is more valuable than a captive one.”
Conclusion
We don’t know what will happen, but it’s happening. There’s a rush but we shouldn’t rush into anything.
Prior commentary on the topic:
- Adblocking and the Fracking of Data: An inconvenient truth about digital content
- Computers Ruined Advertising: Can they save it?
- Adblock as a Tragedy of the Commons: When consumer attention, property rights, privacy rights, media ethics, and market misalignments collide, monopoly wins.
- You say you ignore the banners but they never ignore you.
- Proposal for FTC’s PrivacyCon 2016: “Adblock, Privacy and the Future of the Web”
Style Note: I prefer to use concatendated spellings of the terms “adblock” and “adtech” because it helps to disambiguate these terms from advertising.
