Of ads and blocking
Let’s start with the stuff we know:
- Lots of people use ad-blocking software.
- The number of people using it isn’t dropping (in fact, the opposite).
- Many sites are paid at least some revenues based on the number of ads served (not everything’s pay-per-click) — and whatever you or I think about the PPV model, it exists, and it helps to fund sites we use
- Content publishers have been beating the “ad-blocking is killing us!” drum for years, with no clear success.
- People use adblockers principally because of obnoxious and annoying adverts — most people don’t have a problem with ads in general.
This is not sustainable, clearly.
There are four possible outcomes:
- Publishers manage to convince people not to use ad-blockers (i.e., the moral argument)
- People stop using and installing adblockers because they’re no longer necessary
- Pay-per-view ads die and alternative models are located
- Sites funded by ads die
To date (1) has failed miserably. I can’t envisage a reason why this would change any time soon. To make matters worse, by the time you’ve got as far as telling people that using an adblocker is bad, they’ve already got it installed (not uncommonly by a helpful friend/relative, at that). Persuading people to actively remove it when the reason for installing it in the first place hasn’t gone away is harder than persuading them not to install it in the first place. To make matters worse, I’d wager very few people outside of the industry can name a site which has gone away because ad revenues have dried up (the reality of this is that many sites have come dangerously close, laid off good staff, and scaled things back in desperate attempts to stay solvent).
Despite the inroads pay-per-click has made, pay-per-view doesn’t look like it will die any time soon, either. In any case, the problem is broadly applicable to pay-per-click ads too — it’s just that the effects are felt more directly with pay-per-view. (3) doesn’t look likely. Moving beyond ads, the industry has failed to produce subscription models which work cross-publisher in any sort of sensible fashion, which makes a paywall unworkable for the vast numbers of smaller sites out there.
(4) is fairly likely, but one everybody wants to avoid.
Thus, we are left with (2): people stop using and installing ad-blocking software.
One way for this to happen is for publishers to convince people to, rather than using ad-blocking software, simply not visit sites which have ‘bad’ ads. In theory, this could be the most effective means of killing off bad ads. There are some spanners in the works, though:
- It suffers from the same problems as option (1) above.
- Lots of sites get their traffic from search results. People don’t look at URLs when they’re handing over credit card information, how are you going to convince them to pay attention to destination URLs on a page of search results? And, more importantly, how will people remember which sites to avoid?
- How on earth will you convince them that this is better than just running adblock software in the (very long) period before the ‘bad’ ads die?
I can’t forsee any way around these practical issues, as nice as the idea is. I wouldn’t want to bet my income on it, put it that way. Attempting to change public behaviour wholesale requires a massive amount of effort, and even then there’s a huge chance of failure.
That leaves only one other option: for the content publishing industry to kill the sorts of ads which drive people to ad-blocking software, from within. There are two reasons for this: first, they have a vested interest in seeing this happen — it’s their revenues on the line, and second, it’s about the only thing left to try which stands any realistic chance of success.
And so, if the content publish industry wishes to preserve its pay-per-view revenue, it only has one choice: collectively apply pressure on the ad brokers and other sites who serve up ‘bad’ ads. As much as the publishers need the ads and their brokers, the brokers need the decent sites to place the ads on. If this smells suspiciously like a form of self-regulation, you’d be right — but it’s something that only self-regulation can solve; it’s not an issue which is worthy of a more onerous regime, and it’s one which works best if everybody pulls together (and there’s nothing like the threat of revenue drying up to bring about a spirit of cooperation).
You might question why the onus should be on the publishers to do this, and there’s no good answer to this question: the onus shouldn’t be on the publishers to do it. However, if the publishers want to preserve their current revenue streams, the only thing they can do which actually stands a realistic prospect of success is working together to make the ‘bad’ ads — which keep ad-blocking software from obsolescence — a thing of the past.
(Addendum: you can substitute “pay-per-impression” for “pay-per-view” above, if you wish, as that’s what’s actually being paid for. There’s then an argument that you could adjust ad-blockers to still load ads, but hide using CSS overrides and that this would be some value of “better” — some ad-blocking solutions do this, in fact. This has two consequences: bad ads get more audacious in attempts to evade the more trivial filters, which serves to drive people back to more effective blocking schemes; and worse, the value of an impression is scaled downward to account for the fact that a not entirely insignificant proportion of people never come close to seeing the ads out of the corners of their eyes).
