5 ms·

I don't see any mention of ad blockers. Are these seen as having a significant effect on the online advertising industry? Are there any serious proposals to dea

by djur 10y ago

I don't see any mention of ad blockers. Are these seen as having a significant effect on the online advertising industry? Are there any serious proposals to deal with them other than continuing the ad-blocker-blocker-blocker... arms race? It seems that there's an increasing understanding among publishers that low-quality and intrusive ads encourage their visitors to use ad blockers or another site. Several relatively high-profile sites (like The New Yorker) have stopped using networks like Outbrain and Taboola. (Obnoxious ads from the latter, along with autoplaying video ads on numerous sites, resulted in me finally installing an ad blocker after resisting for years.) Adblock Plus offered a way forward with its "Acceptable Ads" program but it seems like that has been roundly rejected by both advertisers and blocker users. Maybe publishers and advertisers could work together to develop a stricter set of advertising guidelines that show respect for users? I suppose such a program is essentially doomed without cooperation from Google and Facebook, and I don't know if they'd be willing to work with the little fish (or each other). It seems like an intractable problem. I'm not convinced technology (machine learning! the solution to all problems!) is capable of providing the solution.

nl 10y ago
I don't see any mention of ad blockers. Are these seen as having a significant effect on the online advertising industry? They are one of the many things driving advertisers to Facebook. (In-App ads in FB aren't blocked of course.)
- jgalt212 10y ago
  It takes two clicks on a FB ad to get to my site. One click to product page on FB, another click to get to my site. Too many steps.
aggronn 10y ago
The blackmailing scheme that Eyeo calls "Acceptable ads" is untenable because it is simply blackmail. Pay us protection money and sell our approved goods or sell nothing. Google will pay it because they have the money and there isn't an immediate alternative for shareholder value, but there aren't many others who are willing to subsidize ad blocking at the expense of content creators. That all said... There's actually a great deal of effort towards improving quality and dealing with ad blocking at a high level in the industry. One recent effort this year is https://www.betterads.org/ https://www.betterads.org/ but there are other initiatives lead by new adtech companies and other organizations. As a result, I'm confident that ad quality will increase over the next few years overall. But like you say, its an intractable problem. Its not as simple as improving quality on the already reasonably good 75% of adverising that isn't so bad. The bottom of the barrel inventory is likely not going to rise with the change of the tide, for example. If you're trying to stream pirated TV shows or watch porn you're dealing with the North Koreas of the adversiting industry--they're already cut off and live in their own world, and won't follow industry initiatives that publishers like NYT will want. Unfortunately many, many people have no problem with advertising generally but install ad blockers in order to access these sites, and the sites no one had an issue with are just collateral damage. Moreover, many people install ad blockers because, lets be honest: why not? No more pre-roll video. Faster page loads. More premium consumption experience (most) everywhere you go. How do you address those users with better ads? And the cat is already out of the bag anyway. 25% of people on the internet use ad blockers. If you improve ad quality, how do you get these people back? I think we're going to see a radical, unequal shift in the next fews years around the perceived value of content because of the growth of ad blocking. If you told me 10 years ago that everyone was going to be paying $10/mo for music, I wouldn't have believed you, yet here we are. I think if you ask me this time, I'd say in 10 years people will be more inclined to pay for digital content than they've ever been, because as ad blocking grows, the "anti-ad blockers" are going to grow too. More messaging to users about ad blocking, more paywalls, more access control requiring equitable value exchange across the internet. Eventually the middle will get squeezed out by the high cost of ad blocking. Users will choose to whitelist or subscribe for premium content, and the lowest cost publishers who steal, copy, or lie to generate clickbait are the only people who can survive when they've lost half their inventory. > It seems like an intractable problem. I'm not convinced technology (machine learning! the solution to all problems!) is capable of providing the solution. You're absolutely right. This is not going to be solved by machine learning. Ad blocking is an economic and political problem, and will only go away when publishers, advertisers, and users are able to come back into equilibrium. Publishers need more leverage to fight for user experience against advertisers' demands, and users need to understand the value exchange that occurs when they get targeted apple adaptor ads while they read articles about the latest iPhone. Publishers need to offer users more diverse but more firm and equitable options that make quality content sustainable and appealing to even the most privacy oriented audiences. Eyeo need to realize that profiteering on a protest movement is not a ethical business model. Easylist maintainers need to realize that they are not profits sent from god to punish publishers for protecting the value of their content.
- bluetwo 10y ago
  I agree that the real solution is that there has to be a pay model that works. I don't want to pay $99 per year for every newspaper site I might visit, but I would pay $99 per year for some consolidated and trustworthy news source that gathered the news I needed from the places I need it. There has to be better content tools rather than better ad tools. Paying zero dollars for news and content is a failed experiment.
  - cjCamel 10y ago
    This. I assume there is some legacy inertia or opposing force to this in the publishing industry - would be interested to understand the thinking, as it seems like an obvious win for publishers.
  - jnnl 10y ago
    You should check Blendle.com. You Can pay per article.
    - bluetwo 10y ago
      I just signed up for the beta. Looks interesting. It did have to do a double-take as it looks to be part of Medium, which just shut down two major offices and laid off a bunch of people today. Hoping for the best!
- mnm1 10y ago
  Ad blocking will never go away. The time for that has passed; the trust has been lost. Regardless of what the industry does, you will never convince anyone who has discovered ad blocking--which can now be properly known as a part of malware blocking--to open their computers to these same people that fucked them (or people like them) over already. This is purely fantasy.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    I'll happily turn off my ad blocker when it no longer blocks any ads. Hopefully it's because ads are simply static images and text content, served by the target site. Once that happens, I don't mind them. It's not seeing ads that I worry about, it's the ads seeing me. What needs to happen is that both publishers and advertisers need to understand that the time when you could charge per click/impression or show "targeted ads" depending on who your viewer is - is soon over.
tomjen3 10y ago
The problem is that most ads suck. Facebook knows more about me than I do, but they can't come up with ads for things I want. What possible chance does a random newspaper have?
- monochromatic 10y ago
  Even google's ads are garbage, and google should be able to read my mind by now. The closest they ever come to showing me something I might want is the occasional ad for something I recently did buy. Swing and a miss.
- zeta0134 10y ago
  I've always been baffled by this race to target ads to me directly. Sure, you can get a general idea of my interests, but even those change throughout the day, and advertising something to me on Facebook that you gleaned from my GPS or my contact list just creeps me out. It has the reverse effect; I'll go out of my way to block it out. No, I remain convinced that the most effective advertising I see regularly is the "Deals" type posts on Gizmodo. Those are written by the journalists, guaranteed to capture some of my interests or I wouldn't've visited the site in the first place, and difficult to block because they're real content. I actually read them, and am usually genuinely interested in the products, and this requires no tracking or privacy invasion whatsoever to accomplish.
- pascalxus 10y ago
  I completely agree. 99.99% of the ads I see on facebook are for things I don't want. They really need to get more AI and more information about the user for better targeting. They may have world class targeting, but it still sucks compared to advertisement that can read my mind (doesn't exist yet).
  - confounded 10y ago
    Advertisements are supposed to change your mind. The advantage that FB have is that they control many of the other inputs to your mind outside the ad, too.
  - 10y ago

by djur 10y ago

nl 10y ago

I don't see any mention of ad blockers. Are these seen as having a significant effect on the online advertising industry? They are one of the many things driving advertisers to Facebook. (In-App ads in FB aren't blocked of course.)

jgalt212 10y ago
It takes two clicks on a FB ad to get to my site. One click to product page on FB, another click to get to my site. Too many steps.

aggronn 10y ago

The blackmailing scheme that Eyeo calls "Acceptable ads" is untenable because it is simply blackmail. Pay us protection money and sell our approved goods or sell nothing. Google will pay it because they have the money and there isn't an immediate alternative for shareholder value, but there aren't many others who are willing to subsidize ad blocking at the expense of content creators. That all said... There's actually a great deal of effort towards improving quality and dealing with ad blocking at a high level in the industry. One recent effort this year is https://www.betterads.org/ https://www.betterads.org/ but there are other initiatives lead by new adtech companies and other organizations. As a result, I'm confident that ad quality will increase over the next few years overall. But like you say, its an intractable problem. Its not as simple as improving quality on the already reasonably good 75% of adverising that isn't so bad. The bottom of the barrel inventory is likely not going to rise with the change of the tide, for example. If you're trying to stream pirated TV shows or watch porn you're dealing with the North Koreas of the adversiting industry--they're already cut off and live in their own world, and won't follow industry initiatives that publishers like NYT will want. Unfortunately many, many people have no problem with advertising generally but install ad blockers in order to access these sites, and the sites no one had an issue with are just collateral damage. Moreover, many people install ad blockers because, lets be honest: why not? No more pre-roll video. Faster page loads. More premium consumption experience (most) everywhere you go. How do you address those users with better ads? And the cat is already out of the bag anyway. 25% of people on the internet use ad blockers. If you improve ad quality, how do you get these people back? I think we're going to see a radical, unequal shift in the next fews years around the perceived value of content because of the growth of ad blocking. If you told me 10 years ago that everyone was going to be paying $10/mo for music, I wouldn't have believed you, yet here we are. I think if you ask me this time, I'd say in 10 years people will be more inclined to pay for digital content than they've ever been, because as ad blocking grows, the "anti-ad blockers" are going to grow too. More messaging to users about ad blocking, more paywalls, more access control requiring equitable value exchange across the internet. Eventually the middle will get squeezed out by the high cost of ad blocking. Users will choose to whitelist or subscribe for premium content, and the lowest cost publishers who steal, copy, or lie to generate clickbait are the only people who can survive when they've lost half their inventory. > It seems like an intractable problem. I'm not convinced technology (machine learning! the solution to all problems!) is capable of providing the solution. You're absolutely right. This is not going to be solved by machine learning. Ad blocking is an economic and political problem, and will only go away when publishers, advertisers, and users are able to come back into equilibrium. Publishers need more leverage to fight for user experience against advertisers' demands, and users need to understand the value exchange that occurs when they get targeted apple adaptor ads while they read articles about the latest iPhone. Publishers need to offer users more diverse but more firm and equitable options that make quality content sustainable and appealing to even the most privacy oriented audiences. Eyeo need to realize that profiteering on a protest movement is not a ethical business model. Easylist maintainers need to realize that they are not profits sent from god to punish publishers for protecting the value of their content.

bluetwo 10y ago
I agree that the real solution is that there has to be a pay model that works. I don't want to pay $99 per year for every newspaper site I might visit, but I would pay $99 per year for some consolidated and trustworthy news source that gathered the news I needed from the places I need it. There has to be better content tools rather than better ad tools. Paying zero dollars for news and content is a failed experiment.
- cjCamel 10y ago
  This. I assume there is some legacy inertia or opposing force to this in the publishing industry - would be interested to understand the thinking, as it seems like an obvious win for publishers.
- jnnl 10y ago
  You should check Blendle.com. You Can pay per article.
  - bluetwo 10y ago
    I just signed up for the beta. Looks interesting. It did have to do a double-take as it looks to be part of Medium, which just shut down two major offices and laid off a bunch of people today. Hoping for the best!
mnm1 10y ago
Ad blocking will never go away. The time for that has passed; the trust has been lost. Regardless of what the industry does, you will never convince anyone who has discovered ad blocking--which can now be properly known as a part of malware blocking--to open their computers to these same people that fucked them (or people like them) over already. This is purely fantasy.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  I'll happily turn off my ad blocker when it no longer blocks any ads. Hopefully it's because ads are simply static images and text content, served by the target site. Once that happens, I don't mind them. It's not seeing ads that I worry about, it's the ads seeing me. What needs to happen is that both publishers and advertisers need to understand that the time when you could charge per click/impression or show "targeted ads" depending on who your viewer is - is soon over.

tomjen3 10y ago

The problem is that most ads suck. Facebook knows more about me than I do, but they can't come up with ads for things I want. What possible chance does a random newspaper have?

monochromatic 10y ago
Even google's ads are garbage, and google should be able to read my mind by now. The closest they ever come to showing me something I might want is the occasional ad for something I recently did buy. Swing and a miss.
zeta0134 10y ago
I've always been baffled by this race to target ads to me directly. Sure, you can get a general idea of my interests, but even those change throughout the day, and advertising something to me on Facebook that you gleaned from my GPS or my contact list just creeps me out. It has the reverse effect; I'll go out of my way to block it out. No, I remain convinced that the most effective advertising I see regularly is the "Deals" type posts on Gizmodo. Those are written by the journalists, guaranteed to capture some of my interests or I wouldn't've visited the site in the first place, and difficult to block because they're real content. I actually read them, and am usually genuinely interested in the products, and this requires no tracking or privacy invasion whatsoever to accomplish.
pascalxus 10y ago
I completely agree. 99.99% of the ads I see on facebook are for things I don't want. They really need to get more AI and more information about the user for better targeting. They may have world class targeting, but it still sucks compared to advertisement that can read my mind (doesn't exist yet).
- confounded 10y ago
  Advertisements are supposed to change your mind. The advantage that FB have is that they control many of the other inputs to your mind outside the ad, too.
- 10y ago