Ad Blockers: Don’t Fight Them; Understand Them

According to a study called Adblocking goes mainstream, published in September by PageFair, a provider of ad blocking solutions for publishers, and Adobe, there has been a “69% increase in number of Adblock users over the previous 12 months”, in 2014 Q2. Depending on the country, the online population using ad-blocking software can be as high as 28%.

Let us take a look at the issues raised from the three participants’ perspectives (publishers, advertisers, and users), and find ways to monetize the content differently from a publishers’ perspective.

Publishers vs. Advertisers vs. Users

The publishers, their users, and the advertisers are all living in the same ecosystem of information and monetary circulation. Nevertheless, each participant has its own goals and views on the ad-blocking concept.

The publishers provide content and want to reach as many users as possible, while monetizing their work to keep on producing content, paying their expenses, and making some profit on top of it.

That first goal (reaching users) is often obtained by providing free content to the users. Free content can be consumed without friction, but content is not produced for free. The monetizing part of the equation is often solved by adding advertising to the content to keep it free, as putting content behind paywalls tends not to work very well for most publishers.

When the users install ad-blocking software in their browser, the content they consume does not push advertising dollars to the publishers who have to find other ways to monetize it.

The advertisers want to promote a product and/or a brand through exposure to the potential consumers. By putting their ads alongside content interesting for the specific demographic segments they want to reach, they can gain targeted exposure. This is where publishers enter the game. An ad with no contextual content is like a billboard on the side of the road: the brand exposure is wide, but it is hard to tell if it works well in terms of ROI.

Besides, with an ad blocker in place on the visitor browser, the ads can still be served and counted as printed, even if they are not visible any more. This issue is close to the more general ads viewability problem: an ad is still paid for by the advertiser, even if no one actually sees it.

The users are consuming content and are used to doing it for free, especially the marketing segment of the millenials who were born between 1980 and 2000. By installing an ad blocker, these users express a strong message both publishers and advertisers need to understand. This message is segmented by the reason they use ad-blocking software.

According to the previously mentioned survey, almost half of these users do no want ads at all, while a third want to remove specific ads, whether they are found distracting (animations, sounds) or intrusive (pop-over, interstitial, non-skippable video). Performance in term of page speed and battery life, and privacy concerns about third party tracking are also cited as the primary reasons for users installing ad blockers.

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by Alexis Ulrich via SitePoint