What Next for Adblocking?

With Shine recruiting a Chief Revenue Officer in the UK, the next chapter of the Adblocking story begins.

Adblocking has been around about ten years now and there are multiple players in the ecosystem with different approaches. Some just block, some partially block – Adblock plus being one of those favourites, with their ‘Acceptable Ads Program’ i.e. big players (you know who you are) pay for their ads to appear and others who operate on a network level such as Shine.

Truth is, anyone with some simple coding can block ads by accessing the document object model or DOM of a webpage.

Problem with that is that is can lead to data and security infringements of the user’s browser page.

There are a lot of problems with an ever expanding adtech/madtech ecosystem; billions of VC dollars expecting a return medium to long term, multiple technologies offering different flavours of the same thing and browsers (as in people) and many publishers getting and giving a crap experience on the web as a consequence.

The short term objectives of Adblockers is really to get as much PR as possible to achieve scale; the long term is to have a revenue sustainability based on this scale.

Ironically, the simplest way for adblockers to to achieve revenue sustainability at scale is to look to advertising.

Shine plans to target their model on smaller publishers with an ‘ad verification tool’ to allow them to carry advertising free of malware. They say their offering is. not a whitelisted ad network, but will be “a new ad platform”.

Hmm, sounds like the former.

But isn’t the point not to carry ads?

The problem for Shine is their model currently is a B2B model and there are only so many mobile networks they can sell their technology to. That’s before the challenges with respect to net neutrality.

Adblock Plus is a B2C; its free because it carries what it deems acceptable ads.

The alternate would be a subscription model.

The problem for adblocking is people want a free internet. Advertising models pay for that, subscription models don’t.

So the obvious step is to look at advertising – and work out how you can monetise with the exact thing you proclaim to be against.

Adblock plus has a head start.

Looks like the others are following.