I’m a journalist who uses an ad blocker

How badvertising is making me bite my benefactor’s hand

I made my living selling articles to newspapers, magazines and web sites for two decades. It was a good living too, for a while. Eventually the rewards withered and the work became less interesting. As a reformed journalist, I’m keenly aware that publishers need to make money. If they make money, I make money. And yet, I block ads. The irony isn’t lost on me.

Let us count the ways

There are three basic methods online magazines and newspapers use to cover costs and make profit.

• The first is making you pay for content on a piece by piece basis or as part of a subscription.
• The second is hoping you’ll buy other stuff from them, like t-shirts, books and conference tickets.
• The third is the most ubiquitous; advertising.

There are separate arguments to be made about paywalls and merchandising, but advertising as a way to sustain publication is as old as printed journalism. The first surviving example, an advert for Pasqua Rosée’s coffee shop in the Cornhill area of London, appeared in an English newspaper as far back as 1652. Some sources suggest there were newspaper adverts in the 1640s — just a couple of decades after the first newspapers. By 1712, the English government was taxing newspaper ads. That’s a sure sign they were making money.

So, it was natural that when looking for ways to monetise content on the post-academic, newly commercial Internet of the 90s — a platform where content had traditionally been free at the point of access — that advertising was foremost in legacy media’s minds.

A lesson from history

HotWired — a Wired magazine spin-off with original content and a rare example of an early corporate, online publisher — was among the first to use banner ads to pay for its keep in 1994.

As it happens, users never liked adverts online. A review of research conducted way back in 2004 identified that hostility towards banner ads set in almost as soon as they were invented. Clicks on traditional banners dropped from 2% in 1995 to 0.6% in 1998. By 1999, researchers had already identified a phenomenon they called “banner blindness”; the tendency for users to ignore anything on a page that looked like a web advert.

That was, of course, terrible news for advertisers, publishers and all those descending on the innocent, frontier web looking to make a buck.

The first volley in the war for attention was the pop-up; a type of advert that automatically opened in a new window, demanding your full attention.

Though pop-ups are built with JavaScript — a language standardised by a body whose members include Apple, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla — they are now default blocked by most web-browsers.

That’s how annoying they are.

If at first you don’t succeed, escalate

Undeterred, ad vendors developed other ways to interrupt our patterns of interaction, because that’s the only way they can verify they have our attention.

Interstitial ads or “road blocks” are full pages that appear before you’re allowed to read the content link you clicked on. Overlays are layers that cover the article you’re trying to access. Injected video adverts magically unfold as you scroll down the page, auto-playing as they appear. Pop-outs are small ads that suddenly cover the page when you accidentally roll over them.

Despite all this effort, the “click-through” rate for online ads is still much less than 1% in all of those categories.

The click-through rate (or “CTR”) for all display advertising on the web, according to data scraped in 2015 by SmartInsights from Google’s DoubleClick is 0.06%. That’s across Europe, the U.S.A. and UK.

For richer media ads, the CTR is stronger at 0.27%. Those are fewer clicks than traditional banner ads used to get in the late 90s. Mobile display ads are more successful at 0.54% — but that doesn’t seem as optimistic when you take into account the findings of another survey that suggests over half of those clicks are accidental.

In other words, people can’t help clicking on the ads because the user experience is so bad.

The stats continue to paint a grim picture.

• 54% of users don’t click on ads because they don’t trust them.
• 198 million people use ad-blocking software.
• 33% of people describe advertising on the web as “intolerable”.

Intolerable. That’s pretty strong.

A tug of war

Online ads are intrusive, they annoy pretty much everyone — but that’s not why I use ad-blocking software.

Like I said, I’ve been on the sharp end of this debate. I used to be a journalist. I can put up with all of the above, even though I wish there were better ways to achieve the same ends.

No — although all those things irk me — the main reason I use an ad-blocker is because I just want to access content without crashing the site I’m browsing.

There’s a tug of war with creativity holding one side of the rope and commerce the other. Just as editorial and sales are separate in inky media, content and advertising are separate online.

Publications entrust ad serving to third party platforms; companies who do not care about the user experience of accessing content.

And — as a consequence — the user experience offered by too many ad-supported websites is intolerable.

As a writer for .net magazine, I spent much of that time producing features on how to speed up websites, capture users quickly and make content sticky. As a lecturer I teach students how to optimise their work for online reading, following specific workflows and structures.

Bad advertising undoes all the hard work that creatives do to make good content. Badvertising.

I want to scroll through articles without them freezing halfway through. I want to read the whole story without a banner ad refreshing the page before I get to the third paragraph… I just want the web to work.

But, as adverts become more sophisticated, animated and noisy, the hungrier they are for your browser resources. It would be bad enough if the issues were just to do with ad vendors targeting content at high-end devices and somehow getting it wrong. But that can’t be it. It’s more widespread than that.

As I type this, on a 2015 Macbook Pro with 8GB of RAM in the latest version of Google Chrome, ad-block turned off, connected to the internet via 30Mbps fibre broadband, I can hear the soundtrack to an auto-playing video stuttering on and off in the background. The page it’s playing on won’t scroll up or down — it’s stuck halfway down the news-piece I was reading fifteen minutes ago.

How does this benefit anyone?

Signal to noise

My moment of epiphany came a couple of years ago. I was trying to read a piece I had written for a magazine website I used to work on. Every time I tried to access the site in Safari, it crashed. Some stalled process left half the page blank.

I had better luck in Chrome where I could see that the site had been reskinned as part of a sponsorship deal with a car manufacturer, complete with parallax scrolling background. That’s probably what toppled Safari, but it was difficult to tell. There were text ads at the top of the page, video ads injected into the copy, sidebar ads with multimedia filling the sidebar and affiliate links programmatically inserted into the copy — all from separate providers.

My article had been split over multiple pages. When I clicked on the link to get to page two, an interstitial “road block” popped up and crashed the browser.

To read my own piece, I installed an ad-blocking extension to Google Chrome — and I’ve been using one ever since.

The cost to advertisers for my eyes on their ads? A fraction of a penny. It’s a spray and pray, stack ’em high, sell ’em low approach; flinging as much at the user as possible in the hope that some of it will stick.

All ad vendors care about is you seeing their ads — and being able to record that view or click as a metric they can show their clients.

In March 2016, the UK Culture Secretary John Whittingdale referred to ad-blocking as a “modern-day protection racket” in a speech to the Oxford Media Convention, reported in The Guardian.

“Quite simply — if people don’t pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist.”

He’s not entirely wrong. But enforcing a system that few people like, that many actively reject, that is statistically inefficient and that sometimes destroys the value of the very content that it seeks to protect is not the way to go about it.

Instead of finding ways to make advertising harder to avoid and more intrusive, perhaps we’d be better off looking at better targeting, fully integrated and higher value advertising. More discreet, more relevant advertising at a price to business that reflects its efficacy; with opt-in models and transparent information sharing.

Until that happens, I’ll continue to flick on my ad-blocker when I land on any site that breaks my browser.