Blocking ad-blockers with better ads

Two stories about ad blocking almost make a trend. European telecoms want to build ad-blocking into their networks via proxies that would halt most banner-type ads by default. And Adblock Plus has built a standalone Firefox-based browser for Android that would perform roughly the same function as its eponymous and quite popular browser plugin. These are both small but meaningful steps to move ad-blocking from desktop to mobile.

The black-and-white rationale against ad blocking is simple enough: ads are how publishers pay the bills, blocking them is effectively stealing. This, of course, is roughly equivalent to the piracy argument the music and movie industries have made, without much traction, for a decade and a half.

The pro-ad-blockers have their own moral, and compelling, argument that online advertising degrades the user experience, destroys privacy, and is generally reader-hostile.

As in all things, there is no absolute truth but a muddled middle. It’s unclear how big a problem ad-blockers actually are — 5% of global internet users doesn’t sound very high, but the kind of reader who installs an ad-blocker is likely exactly the kind of reader an advertiser wants to reach. And if mobile users get automatically opted-in at the network level, it certainly becomes a much bigger deal.

The problem may be murky, but the solution is a bit more clear, if not exactly novel: build a better product. Not a fancier iPad app, a better ad product. For all the haranguing about native ads, they have the advantage of being immune to filters and, when done right, a genuinely better experience, certainly better than green double-underlines or the “content marketing platform” ads at the bottom of far too many web pages.

I suspect we’ll look back on non-native ads as an aberration, one that only made sense during the brief period when all publishers were local monopolies, hardly an ideal situation either. Now it’s time to make an ad your readers won’t want to block.