Adpocalypse Now
Google has announced its intention to install a default ad-blocker in Chrome, the browser regularly used by 60% of web users.
The move comes after an initiative to set up a coalition of agencies, advertisers and media, the Coalition for Better Ads, to study the problems of online advertising, which after three years work, has told us what we already knew: there are advertising formats such as pop-ups, interstitials that hijack your screen for several seconds, ads with pre-activated sound or video, especially large ones, and all their corresponding versions in the mobile environment, which are especially annoying, and that users are not willing to put up with.
The spread of ad-blockers is unstoppable: they are no longer used only by advanced user segments, but the general public, and were installed on more than 615 million devices in 2017, 11% of the world’s total users (with countries and socio-demographic segments in some countries reaching or exceeding 35%), with a growth of more than 30% during 2016 (report).
Extensions such as AdBlock Plus or their corresponding smartphone apps have been among the most popular, and Google, 89% of whose turnover depends on advertising ($79.38 billion in 2016 on total revenues of 89.46) could not stay on the sidelines. The decision is basically an attempt to preserve the sustainability of the online advertising business: if ad-blocking is not to become the norm, the system will need purging of those who have been abusing it for years.
Google’s decision is not new: several years ago, in the early days of the pop-up format, the company decided to offer a browser toolbar to block them, which for a time was very popular sentencing many campaigns to death and nearly killing pop-up ads. But this latest measure is much more drastic, and backed by a broad coalition of actors. Of course, it is not without controversy: there is clearly a conflict of interest in a company whose business depends on advertising deciding which ads are acceptable and which are not, but everything indicates that Google, which has been monitoring the web for years in a bid to exclude abusers, is in the position to do an infinitely better job than the IAB has been since 1996, which is absolutely nothing.
Obviously, Google believes that its advertising formats are acceptable, and that if the spread of ad-blockers continues it will pay a high price. To avoid this, for some time now it has paid the main blockers to be included on their white lists, although users can, if they wish, use the tool to block them anyway, an option that surely will not be included in the blocker it plans to launch early next year. Nor is it known whether it will decide to ban other blockers from accessing its platform, something that would be complex because there are other players, such as Apple, who have not done so and are not planning to do so. In fact, the other way around: Apple has just announced that it will actively block retargeting, a technique that is annoying for many users who do not want to find ads for hotels in Paris for the rest of their life just because they once searched for somewhere to stay in the French capital.
Google’s approach to offering alternatives to mitigate revenue loss from blocked ads, Google Funding Choices, hasn’t been fully explained either, and is expected to trigger controversy. Everything suggests the advent of a new era in advertising: the end of the stupid idea of annoying the user to make an impact. A simplistic, absurd, unsustainable concept, which with a little luck, will soon be a distant memory. The Google advertising blocker may seem like a dangerous move with potential conflicts of interest … but the vast majority of users will thank the company.
(En español, aquí)
