Ad Blocking Realities And Dirty Little Secrets

In this post I will cover how you may be experiencing a double negative as a buyer of certain types of advertising, the pushback against the deluge of annoying and stalking forms of advertising and that advertisers have no one to blame but themselves for the propagation of ad blocking’s popularity and the arrogance of certain companies methods to stop ad blocking.

But first a personal experience that you may be able to relate to from one of your own experiences.

The Swindle

I remember back in the seventies when I was on my then inexperienced quest to succeed in business. I was in College at the time when I heard about a local movie theater for sale in a town close to where I was studying. I approached the owner who was an older women who had inherited the theater from her father. She was at a point in life where she was looking to retire.

I did my due diligence and found that the theater was indeed profitable and I envisioned many improvements that could be made to increase its profitability.

I convinced the owner to hold a mortgage on the theater with a down payment that I did not have. Being fresh out of the military and in college I did not have any money or credit. Then like a miracle I was reading the newspaper and saw an ad for a mortgage broker who helped people like me who needed unconventional financing.

I thought I found the answer to my problem and called to make an appointment to discuss how I could get a second mortgage on the theater allowing me to realize my desire to be a business owner. The man I talked to was convincing in his presentation and told me that it would not be a problem but that there was an upfront fee required to process the paperwork.

Being blinded by my desire to by the theater I begged, borrowed but did not steal enough to pay the fee. As you probably have already guessed I was swindled and not unlike business owners today who are being taken advantage of and ones much more mature and knowledgeable that I was at that point in my life.

Why? Because the put too much trust in what third parties who are more interested in their own bottom lines than the clients and do not do their due diligence to get the information they need to make an unbiased informed decision.

After my bad experience of buying something that gave me nothing in return I still made many mistakes but to this day one thing I take offense to and will speak out against any company who is arrogant enough to consistently put their own interests at any legal or ethical cost above all including voiced popular opinion-and I refer to the voiced opinion in how we want to experience and navigate the internet.

The desire to be pulled in and engaged, informed and educated and not stalked and inundated with push marketing tactics.

Pulling The Wool

Then new technology came along that allowed advertisers to push ads in news ways based on quantity over quality to track, stalk and push these ads onto consumers with no regard to privacy or the inbound marketing experience consumers were looking for and expected.

All done to fatten their coffers on recurring revenue streams at the expense of their own clients and all of us who love this digital ecosystem we play in and desire to have a pleasurable experience unhampered by these offensive advertising tactics.

The Double Negative

Media profitability has shifted online and the incentives to commit ad fraud have grown. If you are paying for different types of push marketing it is possible that you are not only offending many consumers and possibly losing any chance of gaining them as customers you may be, and probably are not getting what you are paying for, reaching far fewer consumers that you thought.

In this article, Online Advertising Is In Grave Danger. Can Sony And Friends Save It?, By Kaila Colbin, Reid Tatoris, co-founder of Are You a Human, calculates that only "8% of ads even have the possibility of being seen by a human. “It’s time to update Wanamaker,” he says: apparently 92% of my ad spend is wasted; I just don’t know which 92%."

Bob Hoffman wrote about this problem two years ago, in a piece called “The $7.5 Billion Ad Swindle.” And there are many more articles on this subject if you look for them.

It doesn’t seem as if much has changed, and it’s easy to see why: The people who benefit from the system have no incentive to change it. The article goes on to say that agencies have been receiving kickbacks and indirect payments from ad networks under the guise of ‘volume discounts’ for serving as the middlemen between the networks and the clients who were knowingly sold the fraudulent ad impressions. Ad networks knowingly sell bot traffic to publishers and publishers knowingly buy the bot traffic because the resulting ad impressions earn both of them money -- at the expense of the clients who are paying for the impressions.

 Ad Blocking-Not A New Phenomenon

In 2012 commercial websites that were profiting from ads were not listening to do not track messages from consumers. As tracking ads increased along with retargeting more and more consumers started looking for ways to block them.

( Chart courtesy of blogs.law.harvard.edu)

In this chart notice the correlation of the rise in retargeting to the rise in consumers desire to block them.

(Chart courtesy of Don Marti)

Some research suggests that 66% of adult Americans said that they do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. And when the researchers explained how they can be targeted (personal information) the percentage saying they did not want to be targeted went as high as 80%.

Other ad blocking facts:

This year Ad blocking is estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion.

There are now 198 million active adblock users around the world.

Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months.

US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.

UK ad blocking grew by 82% to reach 12 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.

A study by Adobe and PageFair also found that the 45 million active U.S. Web users of ad blockers represent 15% of Web users in the country.

Ad blocking (The Pushback)

Robert Siegel senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered interviewed Lara O'Reilly, Business Insider's global advertising editor, who stated that "According to some estimates, 144 million people globally used an ad blocker last year, and that was up 70 percent year on year."

"So it's definitely on the rise, but it's not necessarily a large proportion of the Internet population. It tends to be the more technically advanced user, skewed toward males, gamers and so on."

Ad blocking software is based on filters for every web page that is loaded and either prevents the ad from showing or blocks the site that hosts the ad. Not all ads are blocked however. Consumers, depending on the software can whitelist certain types of ads which allows those ads to show.

Some ad blockers are configured to only block bad advertising. Bad ads are ads that are annoying, intrusive or are not appropriate. Companies that produce good relevant ads can pay ad blocker providers Plus to have their ads whitelisted.

Ad blocking is becoming so popular and a concern in the industry that the big players are getting on board. Apple has introduced an ad-blocking feature to the Safari mobile browser for iOS 9.

Google has a tool to keep you opted out of personalized ads on the Web. You can opt out of interest-based ads through Ads Settings such as your interests, previous visits to other websites, or demographic details. 

Keep My Opt Outs is a Google Chrome extension that is being introduced as a response to a problem with existing opt-out programs – they’re reset whenever you delete your cookies. By running permanently within the browser, not as a cookie, you’re opted out permanently.

Google also has a subscription based service called Contributor where the more you contribute each month, the more you fund the sites you visit and the fewer ads you see. Based on what you pay each month you will see from 5-50% fewer ads across the sites you visit.

So it seems that whatever the current numbers are presently the big players are expecting ad blocking to grow.

 Ad Blocking-The Arrogance

In this article posted by Wendy Davis at Media Post “IAB To Offer Publishers New Tools Against Ad Blockers”. Wendy reports that The Interactive Advertising Bureau will offer small publishers new tools that could help them combat ad blocking.

The mechanisms aim to help publishers determine whether their visitors are using ad blockers, and if so, send those people messages related to ad blocking and its effect on publishers.

"What we're saying to publishers is experiment. We're not backing any one solution," Scott Cunningham, IAB senior vice president for technology and ad operations told reporters on Tuesday.

One possibility is that publishers could ask visitors to turn off ad blockers in exchange for content. A study conducted by the IAB last year found that 60% of the people who use ad blockers would turn them off in order to access content.

Cunningham says the IAB might go as far as considering legal options against ad blockers, but hasn't yet reached any decisions.

In this just released article at Media Post by Paolo Gaudiano, founder and CEO of Infomous,  Paul had these 5 suggestions for online publishers struggling with ad blockers.

1. Stop calling your customers “thieves.” This one really pushes me over the edge.

 2. Acknowledge that you are the source of the problem.

 3. Do not expect legal solutions to protect you.

 4. Do not try to block the ad blockers.

 5. Actively explore novel solutions.

 In Conclusion

I would like to tell these publishers, especially the most arrogant of them that the tide has gone out. Pushing self-serving messages to consumers, stalking them and trying to scare consumers into not blocking them is not the answer. Inbound marketing is the answer but that would destroy their “Big$$$” recurring revenue business model.

What Are The Alternatives? Advertisers need to find, experiment and implement alternatives. We as consumers as well as advertisers need to work together and not just fight but find a happy medium we can all live with. After all we all have a stake in this digital ecosystem we play in.

Putting your own interests above everything including your clients is doomed to failure in this age of information that has empowered the consumer. It may mean the death of a self-serving business model but the internet will survive and be a better place for it.

Please leave your thoughts by commenting and as always-see you soon-

Pushback Image courtesy of Andrewmellen [dot] com