The Coalition for Better Ads: too little, too late?
After lengthy discussions, Google has managed to put together a coalition with sixteen other companies, including advertising agencies, advertisers, media, social networks and other associations — albeit none representing the users — to try to regulate online advertising in the face of the unstoppable growth of the use of ad blockers.
The Coalition for Better Ads seeks to establish standards for online advertising and develop it using technology created by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). The technology would give points to ads based on a set of criteria that include downloading time, the number of trackers deployed, creativity, and only ads that fall below a certain threshold will be displayed on the pages of participating companies.
It doesn’t seem a particularly encouraging start: we should not forget that the situation we now find ourselves in is the result of years of activity by these same people. Many of the agencies, advertisers and publishers now participating in this coalition have been punishing us with dreadful ads, along their trackers for a long time. If anyone really believes that a coalition like this, without representation from users, is going to come up with acceptable ads, I think they’re in for a big disappointment.
Many in the industry consider the guidelines for acceptable ads originally developed by Eyeo, creators of Adblock Plus, as extremely difficult to meet, requiring almost exclusively small advertisements, text or still images, and that don’t interrupt the flow of content. Eyeo has recently tried to launch an ad exchange platform conforming to its standards, but the two partners it thought it was working with, Google and AppNexus, denied any involvement, closed the Eyeo accounts in their respective platforms, labeling them as “fundamentally harmful to the ecosystem” and “a business we do not want to be part of.” Google, it should be remembered, is one of Eyeo’s main customers paying millions of dollars a year to get its ads unlocked unless users specify otherwise. Eyeo is a controversial company, with an approach that some believe is unacceptable, but that has managed to carve a niche for itself in an ecosystem in which more and more people are downloading its browser extension for their computers and smartphones.
The question is clear: is a small improvement in advertising formats, not too ambitious considering the history of the participants involved, enough to prompt the millions of users who use ad blockers to turn them off? Here’s a tougher question: does anybody really think about how web sites pay for themselves if we all block advertising? It’s quite possible that many people, once they have experienced the internet without advertising, will simply continue to use ad blockers all the time, trying to continue to access content without the usual quid pro quo, and then getting angry when they are denied access, or trying another site when a page attempts to deny them access.
It is quite possible that the many years of abusive advertising formats have created a public that is not prepared to give way now that we can enjoy an ad-free internet experience. It has to be said that the traffic of most pages that have responded by blocking the blockers, a measure considered impopular, has been going drastically down.
The Coalition for Better Ads will have its work cut out if it thinks it can improve a relationship with users that went sour a long time ago. For my part, I’m going to wait a while before turning off my blocker.
(En español, aquí)
