Ads. That has to be the first thing a blogger thinks of while monetizing a blog. It’s easy, the criteria to get accepted if it is Google Ads is limited and its sort of mindlessly effective to a certain extent.
PwC forecasts that global total internet advertising revenue is set to grow from (US) $135.42bn in 2014 to $239.87bn in 2019, a Compound Annual Growth Rate over the period of 12.1 per cent. This means that it will overtake TV, the most popular medium of advertising since the longest time. But if the rising trends towards investments into Ad block software are anything to go by, then this is merely the boom before the doom.
There is a general distrust of ads and they are believed to be used for tracking and profiling. With more and more people realising that ad blocking software can be used easily, the popularity of ads is expected to reduce drastically in the next 10 years.
“But if — as adtech asserts — people are demanding and responding to more personalised and relevant ‘advertising’, why isn’t ad-blocking adoption going down instead of up?” _ Eaon Pritchard, head of strategy at King Content, Melbourne
On the 8th of September this year, the Ad Blocker for iOS was launched. And with it an announcement that iOS9 came with the ability to block ads at a system levels; which means that no matter what browser you are using, all ads will be blocked. They promise, greater speed, greater battery life and of course reduce data costs.
And this means, the easiest and most used monetization strategy for food bloggers may be on it’s way out. According to statistics, usage of these kinds of software has gone up by 41% in the last year!
Fed up of ads that are always looming large in front of their screens, more and more people are using ad block software. What this means is that the people who are largely using ads to monetize, will suffer heavily. As it is the chances of people clicking on an ad is minimal. Added to this is the fact that they are not even showing up on the page.
This PageFair report from 2014 gives an idea of the rapidly rising popularity of the same. In a report from Adobe and PageFair last month, the companies found that there are now 198 million active ad-block users worldwide, costing publishers nearly $22 billion.
Besides this, there is the undeniable fact that ads slow down websites.
Now considering all this, as a company that was looking to monetize for it’s users, we knew ads, at least the traditional model of ads is not something that we can rely on. We may have survived the first few years, and acquired a major catalogue of users and significantly monetized for some time. But eventually, the rejection by readers of ads would have caught up with us and affected our users too. But is it healthy for a monetizing website to ignore ads altogether?
No.
So we are in the process of analysing existing ad networks and the ways in which they work to create an ad network of seamless ads focussed and targeted for the consumers of food blogs. We would ideally want the content and ad to be so intrinsically integrated that the ad will supplement the reading experience as opposed to hampering it. And of course we would take care of managing the ads as well.
The blogger is most often confused with the scores of options available out there. They find decision making hard, and it could take a long time to find a model that would work well for them. As you can see, Beth Moncel, a famous blogger with a huge audience, took nearly 6 years to get it right.
Most of us don’t have that time, because competition is increasing every day. So Cucumbertown would be responsible for finding the best ad solutions for it’s bloggers. We are looking to figure out ways to serve a highly intent driven ad from domain itself and not from a source like ads.doubleclick.net. We are now working with Ad networks directly and integrating in ways that create the least impact for the blogger — both on page load times and manual code injection.
And the other thing we are very conscious about is that desktop browsing is on its way out. With mobile becoming the favoured platform, ads need to be looked at from the purview of the mobile audience. At the moment, ads are extremely infuriating in mobile. So we hope to evolve a similar intrinsic strategy with our mobile ads as well.
If you are a food blogger and you have thoughts around this or you need help, we’d love to talk to you. If you are an ad network we hope we’ll be hearing from you soon. To get in touch with the team write to us on chef@cucumbertown.com.
