COUNTDOWN TO ADMAGEDDON

No time at the moment to comment at length, but Frédéric Filloux’s Monday Note, Ad Blocks’ Doomsday Scenarios is worth reading.

For publishers, ad blockers are the elephant in the room: Everybody sees them, no one talks about it. The common understanding is that the first to speak up will be dead as it will acknowledge that the volume of ads actually delivered can in fact be 30% to 50% smaller than claimed — and invoiced. Publishers fear retaliation from media buying agencies — even though the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats….

Everybody [at Google-sponsored news conference NewsGeist] agreed ad blockers have grown exponentially in every market and were now threatening the whole ecosystem. Their reach now extends to native advertising until now relatively spared since they can be managed by the publisher’s Content Management System instead of an ad-server. But ABP’s engineers found a way to spot and remove any mention like “Sponsored Content” or “Sponsored by”, which creates pernicious side-effects as the user won’t be able to distinguish between commercial and legitimate editorial contents. In doing so, the Eyeo people now drift far away from their self-assigned “mission” to protect users from aggressive ads because branded contents are seen by publishers as a credible alternative to invasive formats that disfigure web sites. As times passes, Eyeo GmbH now veers into anti-advertising activism — a pragmatic pursuit since it collects millions or euros from large players such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola, who all gave in to Eyeo blackmail to have their ads whitelisted.

Where does Filloux think publishers’ cold war with ad-blocking software (and by extension, their customers) will end?

Option #1: use an ad blocking extension and face your preferred site displaying various annoying tricks that will deny or slow down access.

Option #2: opt-in, i.e. register with a valid email address. Yes, you will get ads, but on a selective basis: No autoplay videos, no pop-in windows, etc. From the publisher’s perspective, an opt-in reader is more valuable than an anonymous one, and the loss on the number of formats can be offset by a stiffer rate-card.

Option #3: simply subscribe and you get rid of any ads (except Branded Content that I see as another form of editorial — not my favorite one, for sure — but carrying the best value for publishers and the smaller inconvenience for users. Even better, entire sites and apps will load much faster, which is a solid argument when 50% of the audience reads through mobile.

Related:

Hard to see how this ends well. Unless you’re Facebook. Getting harder to easily imagine an unhappy ending for FB. It may be out there, but it’s further and further in the distance.