Ad blocking: have we learned nothing?
The ongoing ad-blocker war shows once again that humans are incapable of learning from experience. More and more people around the world are installing filters so they can enjoy a advertising-free web experience: in Spain alone, one in four users now does so.
All of this is having an inevitable financial impact on web sites that dependent on advertising revenue. In some cases, this has led to solutions such as branded content, or advertorial, which by mixing editorial content with a plug for this or that product, attempt to be less invasive. But keeping such content credible is no easy task.
Sadly, the general direction we’re headed seems to be toward all out war: media groups such as Germany’s Bild, or America’s Forbes, pretty much all of France’s publishing houses, Yahoo! (not that anybody cares much what it does), Wired, and many others are beginning to block access to people with ad-blockers installed on their computers. At the same time, The Guardian, Spain’s El Confidencial, or OK Cupid, politely ask you to deactivate your ad-blocker or pay for an ad-free version, which can only make you wonder how many readers say: “You know what? You’re right. I’m going to deactivate my ad-blocker right now.” Or perhaps they just go somewhere else, or at best open the site with a different browser, find what they were looking for, and then carry on as before. The war will be taken to the next level as the new generation of ad-blockers focus their efforts on becoming undetectable or downloading ads but not showing them to users.
What’s more, some publications, perhaps driven by a strange survival instinct, have begun to demonstrate that ad-blockers are not just a good way to block advertising, but are also the best way to protect themselves as they move around the internet. Forbes, for example, has taken advantage of readers who deactivate their ad-blockers to slip malware into their computers. Once again, people who install ad-blockers set themselves apart from the pack in protecting themselves. Growing numbers of us are now installing them on our smartphones.
The use of ad-blockers is to all intents and purposes a mass boycott by users of something that advertisers and websites have long taken for granted: that they could pretty much get away with anything. Years of idiotic formats such as pre-activated video and sound, pop-ups, pop-unders and extensions of all kinds have pushed many people over the edge, and who are now getting their own back. The correct response is not to call ad-block users thieves or to dub these solutions “worse than Napster” or to unleash the lawyers, and much less to encrypt advertising to get round filtering, but instead for the industry to act in a unified manner by first expelling wrongdoers, establishing clear guidelines on what is acceptable and what isn’t, and looking for more imaginative solutions that do not tar all advertisers with the same brush… and above all, dialogue, dialogue, and more dialogue.
Let’s be clear about this: nobody is going to put a publication on a white list until they are absolutely sure that it isn’t going to take advantage and send malware down the line or bombard me with outdated, intrusive advertising formats: if a publication wants special treatment that it’s going to have to treat me nice first.
Online advertising is at a crossroads: is the way forward to try to understand what the public wants and to apply a little common sense? So far, it doesn’t seem willing to take that direction, and for as long as it doesn’t growing numbers of people are going to be fitting default setting ad-blockers.
(En español, aquí)
