> We know the oldest segment of the internet doesn’t block ads very much. By contrast, the rate will skyrocket for a younger, more tech-savvy crowd.
That's so contrary to my own experience, I wonder what evidence they used for that.
It's also interesting that they see the 'kind' of ads as a problem, rather than the industry and its way of applying technology as a whole. Ads are a bunch of payload requiring bandwidth (sometimes in short supply), cpu power (and so reduce battery life), waste the recipients time, have been used to spread malware and viruses and are used to track people and build profiles on them. None of those factors have anything at all to do with the content or the format of the ads, and each of those by itself is a very valid reason to install an adblocker, combined the decision is an absolute no-brainer.
For a day or so I used chrome (where I normally use firefox but that browser is currently occupied with a rather long running macro) and my chrome install does not have an adblocker. It's absolutely incredible how much worse the situation has gotten since I started using adblockers.
The advertising industry is the problem, not the ads themselves and I fail to see how they're going to get us out of this mess short of running into a very solid wall.
The fact that the largest advertising company on the planet makes a browser is telling, that may be in the long run the only way ads will survive, by being tied directly to a browser manufacturer which presumably will give them some way to force ads onto your screen. Personally I can't wait for the implosion of the advertising industry, sooner is better. Then we can go back to a web that 'just works' instead of this continuous barrage of commercial junk.
If the web were a radio station we'd be listening to 10 second music fragments interrupted with 12 minute advertising blocks.
>Personally I can't wait for the implosion of the advertising industry, sooner is better. Then we can go back to a web that 'just works' instead of this continuous barrage of commercial junk.
100% agree.
Also, pretty sure I'm not the only one who has started boycotting a product only because it's barrage of advertising is annoying.
> Also, pretty sure I'm not the only one who has started boycotting a product only because it's barrage of advertising is annoying.
You're not the only one. In my case, I for instance decided to never use Groupon because of a barrage of pink and yellow ads I got once (before someone asks again - I'm pretty pretty sure this was way before I've heard any controversy about Groupon).
Hey, at least he spread the knowledge to the remaining two.
We're a step or two away from getting internet content delivered as one giant .png file with the ads embedded in the page and an oldfashioned clickable map (remember those?) for links and advertising.
That's one way of delivering advertising that can't be blocked that I can think of.
> We're a step or two away from getting internet content delivered as one giant .png
Well at least it would be a bit more secure ;) but they won't do this. They'll first block users that use ad-blockers then they will just do some sponsored article with brands or just paywall their news sites.
Either way it's the end of ad networks as we know them.
> They'll first block users that use ad-blockers then they will just do some sponsored article with brands or just paywall their news sites.
That requires a website publisher to act against their visitors. Now, some websites will no doubt do this but they're signing their own deathwarrant with a strategy like that. The advertising industry is relatively powerless when it comes to adblocking, the first ad network that blocks access to the pages of the sites it is running on for users of adblockers will surely see a pretty steep drop in the number of websites they're still allowed to serve.
So only publishers have that power (and I'm fine with that, if they wish to force me to consume their ads I'm perfectly ok with getting my content elsewhere, it's not as if there is a shortage of content on the internet).
Adblockers are forcing a whole class of websites into a variation of the freemium model where the base service is free but only a small percentage is paying because they are still consuming ads. The bigger the ratio between free:paid users the higher the pressure on the remainder to monetize. This will in turn drive some of the remainder towards installing an ad-blocker themselves and so on.
This won't end well for the advertising industry, but it is self inflicted wounds for the most part. If advertisers had not structurally overstepped the bounds of the reasonable then adblockers would have never existed in the first place. Sloppy oversight on what ads they allowed to be served up didn't help either.
If they really wanted to fix this situation they could simply stop digging the hole any deeper.
An actionable plan would look something like this:
- immediately stop tracking and profile building, announce this very loudly and stick to it also in the future.
- strict oversight on the kind of payloads they allow to be sent out
- get rid of the crazy layering of the industry, stick to a simple 3 party model, publisher, advertising agency, consumer (this is a very complex step, agencies do not have the in-house knowledge required to actually serve ads) and take responsibility towards publishers and consumers for the ads served.
Lots of people would lose their jobs, lots of websites would likely go under but the industry as a whole would survive. If they can't make a move like this they are in fact milking the cow until it dies and die it will, their actions to date have only accelerated the process.
One of the problems that is hard to address is that the advertising industry is in an arms race internally, if one party starts using a new and even more invasive technique to outperform its competitors it gets all the business and this then results in adoption of that technique across the board.
And all this to (sarcasm mode on) 'improve your online experience and serve you more relevant content'.
> That requires a website publisher to act against their visitors.
Some do try, but then Google stepped in and told them that if you want to paywall stuff, get ready to disappear from search results.
> If they wanted to fix this situation they could simply stop digging the hole any deeper. (...)
> (...)
> One of the problems that is hard to address is that the advertising industry is in an arms race internally, if one party starts using a new and even more invasive technique to outperform its competitors it gets all the business and this then results in adoption of that technique across the board.
Indeed. This is your standard, garden-variety coordination problem. They are not able to execute your plan even if every single ad company was internally on-board with it - because they don't have a way to enforce coordination. Proliferation of ad-blockers may force them to by basically destroy their business model. Typically a government entity is another proven way, but it's hard to enact and enforce something like this on a global Internet sector.
The problem is this would be admitting that the big lie (user targeting produces relevant more effective ads) is a big lie.
User targeting destroys the social fear of missing out mechanic -- nobody believes advertising affects them, but everyone believes that advertising affects the other guy. I have to pay attention to untargeted ads because anything they claim is something "everyone knows", even if it's a lie.
But once retargeting pulls back the curtain on the wizard the user realizes that the ads they're seeing are individually selected just for them. Digital ads drop from (pretending to be) a primary cultural information source to the equivalent of a pushy door-to-door salesman, individually lying to you.
But if you admit that all user targeting does is goose vanity metrics while damaging the value the ad inventory generates, most of the jobs in the digital ads industry evaporate overnight -- including most of the ad-adjacent staff at both the publishers and the brands -- so everyone is incentivized to keep the charade up.
I think retargeting was the turning point. Up to there the ad industry could get away with what they were doing without the users wising up. But once retargeting became the norm people realized that they are being targeted individually and a whole raft of them switched on adblockers in response. Nothing more irritating than an ill-timed retargeting campaign.
I think the future model will be built on compromise. If you tell the users "Please turn the adblocker off for my site, I promise to be reasonable", most of them would actually do it.
The problem is that the 'future model' will still involve an ad network (because publishers can't be bothered to do their own direct-to-agency sales and agencies can't be bothered to negotiate directly with publishers). And as soon as that happens the responsibility for enforcing the 'reasonableness' has been passed to a third party and we're back to square one because at least one of them will figure out they can make more money that way.
That's what got us into this mess in the first place, we already had your model and it slowly got replaced by the one generating this backlash.
Don't worry, once every site is asking users to disable their ad blockers, people will get sick of that and install additional countermeasures. There are already extensions and filtersets to prevent detection and hide these messages, I make sure to enable them for everyone who I install adblock for (usually after removing all the malware they got by clicking ads). It's an unfortunate reality that unless you're fairly tech savvy, ads will not only track you but infect you.
I've given up completely, no request to disable an adblocker is "reasonable" and there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad" anymore.
They are still in the denial and fight-back stages.
He says: "The study should also confirm that people who are ideologically opposed to advertising are a minority compared to the ones who have installed an ad blocker simply because digital promotions and tracking have become unbearable".
This shows that they still don't see the big picture - that it's not just in digital media that ads have completely crossed the line, it's everywhere, from TV, radio and print, to billboards, jumbo-trons and corporate names on structures and landmarks.
They are still clinging to the idea that they can go back to good times if they just reform some of their practices.
This is the end result of one group (publishers) relying on a revenue stream (advertisers) that destroys their own service and credibility. They still don't understand this.
I am pretty sure that they fully understand it but they can not openly admit it because that would completely destroy their ad revenues forever. Instead they try to get back to the good old days somehow because money from ads is the method which requires the lowest effort on their side.
In fact, already in Godard's 1972 film Tout va bien, it is said (quoted from memory): "the Press has signed its own death sentence, when it has decided to rely on ads for its survival."
But 43 years later, rumours of the death of the press have been appear to have been greatly exaggerated even whilst entirely new categories of multibillion dollar company also rely on ads for survival...
The main problem with adblocking is you never go back; they can't hope to "win back" anyone, that's absolutely hopeless.
There may be a little bit of hope in stopping the hemorrhage: making people that have not yet installed an adblocker to not do it, if they can paint the move as not really worth it. But even that is going to be very hard, so we'll see.
Yes, I think that's true. I certainly won't remove a single ad blocker - I currently browse with 4 blockers installed (LoL). Whatever one of them doesn't block, another one usually will.
I've previously advocated for a different kind of reform. I want advertisers to start paying web users directly. Then web users can reward publishers with their traffic.
It's not a perfect solution because it probably means that web users will still see advertising, but at least they would be somewhat compensated for it.
Not the person you're asking but I'm using ghostery, abp and umatrix and between them they seem to do a pretty good job of improving my web browsing experience. umatrix takes a bit of getting used to but is very powerful.
I am also using Ghostery and found it really good. I was curious to know if the web experience it provided could be even improved. Thanks for the tips!
I was with some friends travelling to central London recently, and we exited the tube system at Tottenham Court Road station. This station is currently undergoing refurbishment as part of the new Crossrail extension, and you now leave through a recently constructed exit.
On the way up the escalators, we all commented to each other how the station felt considerably different to other tube stations. It felt better, nicer, more pleasant. This was strange, as the fit and finish is no different to other new tube stations. Eventually one of my friends realised the difference: there was no advertising.
I think we underestimate the mental load that advertising clutter causes us, even when it's merely in the background. We're so used to it that it's not until it's gone that we realise how burdensome it actually is.
I actually quite like adverts in the underground... in London I always look at the posters when on an escalator to see if any shows (musicals/plays) look interesting, and I still enjoy looking at adverts on the Paris metro now I live here, again mostly for shows/art exhibitions/music (but also partly to absorbe French culture).
I work in marketing / previously worked in more direct advertising, yet most of the time find adverts annoying. But not on the underground.
It probably depends on the types of ads (and each person's personal preferences). For me, I'm like you in that I'd much prefer to see ads of musicals/plays and other local goings-on in my own hometown or as tourist somewhere instead of ads for toothpaste, cars, apps, etc.
Agreed. Tube ads are the only ones I'm happy to view as they're mostly for museums, galleries or theatres.
Otherwise I actively avoid advertising wherever possible – I haven't watched broadcast TV or commercial radio in years and block all the things online.
Interestingly, the other day I was on the tube and every single ad was for web-based services. No physical products or pre-Internet companies at all.
> I actually quite like adverts in the underground...
Perhaps because they are passive - you choose to view or not simply by looking at them or elsewhere.
Digital media is often a different mechanism - actively choosing to interrupt what you are reading or doing. Which causes the user behavior the publishers are struggling so hard to avoid - abandonment.
It was great visiting Cuba for exactly this reason. That's a country entirely untouched by American-style capitalism; namely putting a brand and label on any empty space. Their cities and highways have life to them, such a beautiful country! It's a damn shame the embargo is ending, multinationals are going to destroy the place.
I went to the US for the first time a few weeks ago, and even coming from the UK I was surprised by the pervasiveness and deep saturation of advertising.
OK, Times Square is a special case, but it didn't seem to get much better elsewhere. Pretty much everything that could be held still for more than five minutes seemed to be sponsored, co-branded or had an advert stuck on it. I was surprised the pigeons didn't have little logos stuck on their wings.
I just could not get my head around the TV ads for medicines. They were some of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, beyond parody. One advert had an elderly couple laughing, drinking wine and standing around on boats, while a voiceover quickly listed all the terrible side effects of taking it. For about three minutes.
Playing the devil's advocate here but are ads really worse these days? If anything, I remember them being a lot worse in the early 2000s (e.g remember "you are the 1000000th visitor, claim your price" popups, the flashy gifs and the large header banners). These days, I feel they are more tasteful and better targeted. I personally would be sad to see ads go away completely as they form a system of price discrimination which allows poorer people (and kids) to have free access to content (the rich effectively subsidising their access).
We must be on different world-wide-webs. I've had the distinct displeasure to use the web without an adblocker for a day or so recently and I couldn't wait to get back to my other browser. It's gotten much worse since the 2000's, the amount of screen real estate given over to ads and the number of animations dwarfed anything I remember from long ago. Ads left, right, above and in the middle of the content, and even in the footer.
One page I looked at (the homepage of a popular dutch news site) has no less than six adverts on it, two of them animated and one a 'rotator', taking up a very large fraction of the total available space. Compared to a 1980's newspaper or a 2001 website that's absolutely horrific, all this besides the tracking and other implications.
So yes, it's gotten really worse, and not just a little bit. The creatives look better and the 1000000th visitor ads (that were spread through 24x7 mostly) were dumb but there are other metrics than the 'level' at which an ad addresses the audience.
Back then, the majority of amateur websites used to have ads due to being hosted on one of the ad supported platforms (e.g Geocities [1], Angelfire [2], Tripod.com, etc.). Even major web portals had flashy ads at the very top of their home page [3][4][5][6]. Remember at 800x600 resolutions, those ads took a good chunk of the screen. Download portals (where most people got their software) were routinely serving adware/spyware with little risk of backlash [7]. I could go on and on... (thanks for bringing back memories by the way!)
I'm not saying you're completely wrong but you seem to remember the past through rose colored glasses.
- full screen pop-ups obscuring the entire article
- popups that obscure the article after you start reading and scroll down
- campaigns that follow you everywhere
- advertising in the middle of the text you're reading, in the same font as the article
- entire articles written simply to be able to place a product or an ad (advertorials)
- pages on which 50% or more is taken over by ads
and on and on.
Really the web of 2000 was so much more innocent in this respect. Those 640x480 ads were relatively easy to ignore, usually above the fold and maybe a skyscraper along the side but that was about it. Irritating, sure. But nothing compared to being hounded by ads for a specific product because you once googled a particular term or that feeling halfway through reading something that it is simply an un-declared ad.
Btw, I host a copy of geocities today and it is entirely ad free :)
I think it's a lot worse. Once you take yourself out of the cesspool (I cut the TV cable 4 years ago), and start really being careful about your exposure to worst of it, the impact of the few that manage to get past your defenses is magnified.
Yes, as an example of excessive advertising, the biggest concert hall in Paris, which people just call Bercy because it's the landmark building of this neighbourhood, has been renovated and is now named Accorhotel Arena. Stupid marketing people believe they can be perceived as the benevolent pygmalions of arts and sports but they so obiously want free advertising whenever journalists will refer to this place. It only makes me want to boycott their hotels.
It's not the website providers business what I do with the bits reaching my network. I choose to display and render what I want, and they choose to deliver what they want. It's not complicated. That is the most fundamental principle of information technology. One decides what to send, another one decides what to receive.
If a company dies because of adblockers, let the company die. That's economy.
In the music industry, technology and economy have worked hand in hand to 'let record companies die'. The result is that most projects nowadays are home-made, resulting in a generalized cacophony where it's so hard to find quality content that people are giving up. This is what's going to happen here as well. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Hopefully this will make people go back to real-world local structures, which are going to be profitable again.
I can understand that somebody being exposed to this idea for the first time would be dubious. If you'd rather hear it from some of the world's top creators, check out presspauseplay.com.
The first time? That idea is being pushed since blogs started gaining mass recognition, if not before. Hearing famous people (particularly ones who got famous with the old model) repeat it doesn't make it true. Do they say anything interesting to support their position?
@icebraining: I never said that idea was new, all I said was that apparently everybody hasn't been exposed to it. There are a few different opinions in this documentary, from this arrogant writer who got famous with the old model and is now in love with the new one because he can deal directly with his audience, to art lovers who are humbly searching for new ways, in theory or in practice. But this isn't the subject here, and you don't provide much to support your point of view yourself, so I'll stop replying.
A modern news team should be financially rewarded for its contribution to traffic progression as well audience quality and retention performance
Clickbait forever!
The only way to end the arms race is to go back to simple display ads: you get a JPG of a fixed size on the article, served from the same webserver. No tracking, no javascript, no flash, no audio, no animation.
That's a subtle hint to the extended corruption spayed by advertising. Publishers' jargon is centered around CTR, CPM, and traffic, because of their limited understanding of the technology powering their revenue. They grasp at whatever simplified concepts other non-technical persons showed down their throat (like "big data"), to keep their illusion of power and stability.
And they optimized for those numbers at the expense of everything else and now they're somewhat surprised there is a counterforce to their optimizations.
I have witnessed these "optimizations" taking place in the previous ad-tech-startup I worked at. The story goes like this, everything was (almost) fine, the product worked and it wasn't obtrusive. But, the numbers (CTR, conversions, etc..) were a bit low, and since the revenue of the company were based on these metrics ('cause they are easy to collect and analyse), someone was tasked to find ways to increase them. Of course, this is where everything goes through the door, because the easiest way to increase CTR/conversions is by adopting shady techniques like almost-nude-model or underwear pictures, pop-ups (@#$&%$#!), modals, etc..
I can see multiple reasons why advertising like that is doomed to fail. First is the business model; pricing for performance is not an option. Second is the people; you gotta get rid of the nagging layer of incompetence/ignorance of the ones making decisions. Last, the more business advertisers are losing, the more they are using shady techniques.
In the end, better let the whole industry crash hard and fast, so we can build something better after.
We're at a point where ad blockers are used by a majority of the first parts of the audiences. The article and the talks it references all seem to be about how to slow down or halt the adoption of ad blockers so it won't get that to that point.
I don't think we can safely suggest a majority of media consumers on the internet are using ad blockers.
As the author states, we should be wary of most stated statistics on blocker usage. Neither the 25% nor 90% numbers he gives represent the global internet user base broadly enough for such an assertion.
My statement wasn't about the world, only about the existence of such demographic groups. I was thinking about groups such as "urban young German laptop owners".
> We're at a point where ad blockers are used by a majority of the first parts of the audiences.
Ok. I guess if that meant urban young German laptop owners I was misinterpreting.
Audiences of content, in general, really aren't yet close to being a majority ad block users.
Of course, the trend will continue if media companies continue as they are or become more belligerent. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine a browser manufacturer partnering with / buying an ad blocker to install as default. Then we'll certainly see these majorities.
I don't want to pay google. I want to pay the publisher directly. All this will do is give google even more power over publishers which is the last thing we need.
More power? The already use countless google products, AdSense being where they currently serve ads from. Publishers don't lose power. Google relies on publishers for revenue, I don't see them purposefully hurting a publisher.
It's interesting how problem-solving paradigms can lead somebody to places they probably wouldn't go otherwise.
"... In a wide study to be conducted globally in the coming months, Google will try to ascertain what exactly motivates a web user to install an ad blocker..."
I have many friends who train people. We agree on some things and disagree on others. What I find among some of my trainer friends is that if I disagree with them, the problem must be that I haven't been "trained" enough. They use training to change the world. If the world doesn't look like it's supposed to, then time to do some more training.
Google are data folks. If their business model doesn't work any more? Must gather more data.
Why do people install ad blockers? If we could only identify the top 3 drivers, then make some kind of short-term trade with them to prevent this behavior (The kid of short-term trade that looks good in the beginning but sucks for the user later on.)? We can fix this.
We must be careful that we don't approach problems already knowing what the solution is. This is especially tough in an established and crazy profitable industry. If your tool is to give people free stuff while collecting data to present them with ads, when presented with a problem, odds are that your solution is going to involve giving people free stuff while collecting data to present them with ads.
The assumption that Google is aiming solely for a short-term trade is absurd. A competent business like Google very much goes for long term solutions, especially when Adwords drives their revenue.
There’s a filter based on the total number of votes and the ratio of comments to votes, which I think this just tripped. It’s designed to reduce the occurrence of front-page ‘flame wars’.
Publishers cannot blame advertisers 100% for this situation.
As an advertiser, I tried several times to offer, less intrusive ads in exchange for lower CPM. Publishers never, not even once, would be willing to reduce their price by even a penny in exchange for friendlier ads.
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[ 55.4 ms ] story [ 3545 ms ] threadThat's so contrary to my own experience, I wonder what evidence they used for that.
It's also interesting that they see the 'kind' of ads as a problem, rather than the industry and its way of applying technology as a whole. Ads are a bunch of payload requiring bandwidth (sometimes in short supply), cpu power (and so reduce battery life), waste the recipients time, have been used to spread malware and viruses and are used to track people and build profiles on them. None of those factors have anything at all to do with the content or the format of the ads, and each of those by itself is a very valid reason to install an adblocker, combined the decision is an absolute no-brainer.
For a day or so I used chrome (where I normally use firefox but that browser is currently occupied with a rather long running macro) and my chrome install does not have an adblocker. It's absolutely incredible how much worse the situation has gotten since I started using adblockers.
The advertising industry is the problem, not the ads themselves and I fail to see how they're going to get us out of this mess short of running into a very solid wall.
The fact that the largest advertising company on the planet makes a browser is telling, that may be in the long run the only way ads will survive, by being tied directly to a browser manufacturer which presumably will give them some way to force ads onto your screen. Personally I can't wait for the implosion of the advertising industry, sooner is better. Then we can go back to a web that 'just works' instead of this continuous barrage of commercial junk.
If the web were a radio station we'd be listening to 10 second music fragments interrupted with 12 minute advertising blocks.
100% agree.
Also, pretty sure I'm not the only one who has started boycotting a product only because it's barrage of advertising is annoying.
You're not the only one. In my case, I for instance decided to never use Groupon because of a barrage of pink and yellow ads I got once (before someone asks again - I'm pretty pretty sure this was way before I've heard any controversy about Groupon).
As if we should feel guilty about it.
We're a step or two away from getting internet content delivered as one giant .png file with the ads embedded in the page and an oldfashioned clickable map (remember those?) for links and advertising.
That's one way of delivering advertising that can't be blocked that I can think of.
Well at least it would be a bit more secure ;) but they won't do this. They'll first block users that use ad-blockers then they will just do some sponsored article with brands or just paywall their news sites.
Either way it's the end of ad networks as we know them.
That requires a website publisher to act against their visitors. Now, some websites will no doubt do this but they're signing their own deathwarrant with a strategy like that. The advertising industry is relatively powerless when it comes to adblocking, the first ad network that blocks access to the pages of the sites it is running on for users of adblockers will surely see a pretty steep drop in the number of websites they're still allowed to serve.
So only publishers have that power (and I'm fine with that, if they wish to force me to consume their ads I'm perfectly ok with getting my content elsewhere, it's not as if there is a shortage of content on the internet).
Adblockers are forcing a whole class of websites into a variation of the freemium model where the base service is free but only a small percentage is paying because they are still consuming ads. The bigger the ratio between free:paid users the higher the pressure on the remainder to monetize. This will in turn drive some of the remainder towards installing an ad-blocker themselves and so on.
This won't end well for the advertising industry, but it is self inflicted wounds for the most part. If advertisers had not structurally overstepped the bounds of the reasonable then adblockers would have never existed in the first place. Sloppy oversight on what ads they allowed to be served up didn't help either.
If they really wanted to fix this situation they could simply stop digging the hole any deeper.
An actionable plan would look something like this:
- immediately stop tracking and profile building, announce this very loudly and stick to it also in the future.
- strict oversight on the kind of payloads they allow to be sent out
- get rid of the crazy layering of the industry, stick to a simple 3 party model, publisher, advertising agency, consumer (this is a very complex step, agencies do not have the in-house knowledge required to actually serve ads) and take responsibility towards publishers and consumers for the ads served.
Lots of people would lose their jobs, lots of websites would likely go under but the industry as a whole would survive. If they can't make a move like this they are in fact milking the cow until it dies and die it will, their actions to date have only accelerated the process.
One of the problems that is hard to address is that the advertising industry is in an arms race internally, if one party starts using a new and even more invasive technique to outperform its competitors it gets all the business and this then results in adoption of that technique across the board.
And all this to (sarcasm mode on) 'improve your online experience and serve you more relevant content'.
Some do try, but then Google stepped in and told them that if you want to paywall stuff, get ready to disappear from search results.
> If they wanted to fix this situation they could simply stop digging the hole any deeper. (...)
> (...)
> One of the problems that is hard to address is that the advertising industry is in an arms race internally, if one party starts using a new and even more invasive technique to outperform its competitors it gets all the business and this then results in adoption of that technique across the board.
Indeed. This is your standard, garden-variety coordination problem. They are not able to execute your plan even if every single ad company was internally on-board with it - because they don't have a way to enforce coordination. Proliferation of ad-blockers may force them to by basically destroy their business model. Typically a government entity is another proven way, but it's hard to enact and enforce something like this on a global Internet sector.
Traditionally, I feel obliged to link to this excellent treatment on coordination problems: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
User targeting destroys the social fear of missing out mechanic -- nobody believes advertising affects them, but everyone believes that advertising affects the other guy. I have to pay attention to untargeted ads because anything they claim is something "everyone knows", even if it's a lie.
But once retargeting pulls back the curtain on the wizard the user realizes that the ads they're seeing are individually selected just for them. Digital ads drop from (pretending to be) a primary cultural information source to the equivalent of a pushy door-to-door salesman, individually lying to you.
But if you admit that all user targeting does is goose vanity metrics while damaging the value the ad inventory generates, most of the jobs in the digital ads industry evaporate overnight -- including most of the ad-adjacent staff at both the publishers and the brands -- so everyone is incentivized to keep the charade up.
That's what got us into this mess in the first place, we already had your model and it slowly got replaced by the one generating this backlash.
I've given up completely, no request to disable an adblocker is "reasonable" and there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad" anymore.
This shows that they still don't see the big picture - that it's not just in digital media that ads have completely crossed the line, it's everywhere, from TV, radio and print, to billboards, jumbo-trons and corporate names on structures and landmarks. They are still clinging to the idea that they can go back to good times if they just reform some of their practices.
This is the end result of one group (publishers) relying on a revenue stream (advertisers) that destroys their own service and credibility. They still don't understand this.
I am pretty sure that they fully understand it but they can not openly admit it because that would completely destroy their ad revenues forever. Instead they try to get back to the good old days somehow because money from ads is the method which requires the lowest effort on their side.
There may be a little bit of hope in stopping the hemorrhage: making people that have not yet installed an adblocker to not do it, if they can paint the move as not really worth it. But even that is going to be very hard, so we'll see.
I've previously advocated for a different kind of reform. I want advertisers to start paying web users directly. Then web users can reward publishers with their traffic. It's not a perfect solution because it probably means that web users will still see advertising, but at least they would be somewhat compensated for it.
On the way up the escalators, we all commented to each other how the station felt considerably different to other tube stations. It felt better, nicer, more pleasant. This was strange, as the fit and finish is no different to other new tube stations. Eventually one of my friends realised the difference: there was no advertising.
I think we underestimate the mental load that advertising clutter causes us, even when it's merely in the background. We're so used to it that it's not until it's gone that we realise how burdensome it actually is.
I work in marketing / previously worked in more direct advertising, yet most of the time find adverts annoying. But not on the underground.
Otherwise I actively avoid advertising wherever possible – I haven't watched broadcast TV or commercial radio in years and block all the things online.
Interestingly, the other day I was on the tube and every single ad was for web-based services. No physical products or pre-Internet companies at all.
Perhaps because they are passive - you choose to view or not simply by looking at them or elsewhere.
Digital media is often a different mechanism - actively choosing to interrupt what you are reading or doing. Which causes the user behavior the publishers are struggling so hard to avoid - abandonment.
OK, Times Square is a special case, but it didn't seem to get much better elsewhere. Pretty much everything that could be held still for more than five minutes seemed to be sponsored, co-branded or had an advert stuck on it. I was surprised the pigeons didn't have little logos stuck on their wings.
I just could not get my head around the TV ads for medicines. They were some of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, beyond parody. One advert had an elderly couple laughing, drinking wine and standing around on boats, while a voiceover quickly listed all the terrible side effects of taking it. For about three minutes.
One page I looked at (the homepage of a popular dutch news site) has no less than six adverts on it, two of them animated and one a 'rotator', taking up a very large fraction of the total available space. Compared to a 1980's newspaper or a 2001 website that's absolutely horrific, all this besides the tracking and other implications.
So yes, it's gotten really worse, and not just a little bit. The creatives look better and the 1000000th visitor ads (that were spread through 24x7 mostly) were dumb but there are other metrics than the 'level' at which an ad addresses the audience.
I'm not saying you're completely wrong but you seem to remember the past through rose colored glasses.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/geocitizens-fume-over-watermark/
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208003328/http://angelfire.c...
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/19990208014605/http://www.lycos.c...
[4] http://web.archive.org/web/20000229043301/http://www.altavis...
[5] http://web.archive.org/web/20031012062202/http://yahoo.com
[6] http://web.archive.org/web/20010402054709/http://www.msn.com...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation
- popups that obscure the article after you start reading and scroll down
- campaigns that follow you everywhere
- advertising in the middle of the text you're reading, in the same font as the article
- entire articles written simply to be able to place a product or an ad (advertorials)
- pages on which 50% or more is taken over by ads
and on and on.
Really the web of 2000 was so much more innocent in this respect. Those 640x480 ads were relatively easy to ignore, usually above the fold and maybe a skyscraper along the side but that was about it. Irritating, sure. But nothing compared to being hounded by ads for a specific product because you once googled a particular term or that feeling halfway through reading something that it is simply an un-declared ad.
Btw, I host a copy of geocities today and it is entirely ad free :)
I refuse to have every famous person of the past and the present to be subconsciously linked to six letters of a brand name.
So I installed adblock. This is quite ironic, since Google depends on people looking at ads.
If a company dies because of adblockers, let the company die. That's economy.
I've never had an easier time finding great new music.
Clickbait forever!
The only way to end the arms race is to go back to simple display ads: you get a JPG of a fixed size on the article, served from the same webserver. No tracking, no javascript, no flash, no audio, no animation.
Hopefully it will be over very soon.
I can see multiple reasons why advertising like that is doomed to fail. First is the business model; pricing for performance is not an option. Second is the people; you gotta get rid of the nagging layer of incompetence/ignorance of the ones making decisions. Last, the more business advertisers are losing, the more they are using shady techniques.
In the end, better let the whole industry crash hard and fast, so we can build something better after.
We're at a point where ad blockers are used by a majority of the first parts of the audiences. The article and the talks it references all seem to be about how to slow down or halt the adoption of ad blockers so it won't get that to that point.
But we have reached that point already.
As the author states, we should be wary of most stated statistics on blocker usage. Neither the 25% nor 90% numbers he gives represent the global internet user base broadly enough for such an assertion.
Yet.
Ok. I guess if that meant urban young German laptop owners I was misinterpreting.
Audiences of content, in general, really aren't yet close to being a majority ad block users.
Of course, the trend will continue if media companies continue as they are or become more belligerent. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine a browser manufacturer partnering with / buying an ad blocker to install as default. Then we'll certainly see these majorities.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
"... In a wide study to be conducted globally in the coming months, Google will try to ascertain what exactly motivates a web user to install an ad blocker..."
I have many friends who train people. We agree on some things and disagree on others. What I find among some of my trainer friends is that if I disagree with them, the problem must be that I haven't been "trained" enough. They use training to change the world. If the world doesn't look like it's supposed to, then time to do some more training.
Google are data folks. If their business model doesn't work any more? Must gather more data.
Why do people install ad blockers? If we could only identify the top 3 drivers, then make some kind of short-term trade with them to prevent this behavior (The kid of short-term trade that looks good in the beginning but sucks for the user later on.)? We can fix this.
We must be careful that we don't approach problems already knowing what the solution is. This is especially tough in an established and crazy profitable industry. If your tool is to give people free stuff while collecting data to present them with ads, when presented with a problem, odds are that your solution is going to involve giving people free stuff while collecting data to present them with ads.
Now let's hope they don't take a whole raft of publishers with them.
In this case the flagging is ridiculous and the moderators should ban the company IPs that the flags came from.
Censorship at its finest.
Publishers cannot blame advertisers 100% for this situation.
As an advertiser, I tried several times to offer, less intrusive ads in exchange for lower CPM. Publishers never, not even once, would be willing to reduce their price by even a penny in exchange for friendlier ads.
I think without any irony.