Digital Marketing & Ad-blockers

An Adobe and PageFair report has found that the use of ad blocking tools is up. Two hundred million people now block digital ads, about 7 percent of the 2.8 billion humans online — up from 30 million ad blockers in 2011. There are now 198 million active adblock users around the world. Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months. Ad blocking has been estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion during 2015. Hence, for the digital marketer, it has become even more important to understand ad-blocking.

What is ad-blocking?

In the digital world, the growing popularity of ad-blocking is the crisis of the moment, threatening the nearly $60 billion online ad industry. Ad-blockers are extensions available on the most popular browser like Chrome, Safari and Firefox that allow users to block all sorts of ads including but not limited to ads shown on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Gravatars etc. What this means for the digital marketer is all that money you have spent paying Google to show your ads are for naught because the Google system sees those ads as being shown while the user doesn't actually see them. (See: Is ad-blocking killing your conversions?)

Why do people use ad-blockers?

(Source)

Is it legal?

Yes. However there are nuances. As Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, puts it here, "As abetted by for-profit technology companies [like Apple], ad blocking is robbery, plain and simple -- an extortionist scheme that exploits consumer disaffection and risks distorting the economics of democratic capitalism. When implemented by consumers, ad blocking is a crucial wakeup call to brands and all that serve them about their abuse of consumers' good will."

So, is it all bad?

There are those who believe that ad-blockers are actually a boon for the digital marketing industry. For one, they are forcing marketers to realize that their ads have gotten more bloated, more invasive and therefore need to change so that the user actually derives some value from it.

For example, recently, Scott Cunningham of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), blogged that, "in response to user concerns about security and battery life concerns, IAB is rolling out something called L.E.A.N.—which stands for "Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive" ads. The goal is to address privacy and security by (finally) serving up encrypted ads and to reduce the size and processor-hogging power of animated and video ads.

How can Digital Marketers solve this problem?

The first method, the most obvious one, and the most ethically questionable one, is to pay to be whitelisted by the ad-blockers. This allows your ads to be shown on the website even though the user has installed said ad-blocker. Why this is ethically questionable is more succinctly put here:

Adblock Plus has a carefully policed policy of whitelisting sites, i.e. letting approved ads through the filter. This is a controversial process, as there are rumours abound that Google, Amazon, and other big names aren’t shy about paying Adblock Plus to add them to the whitelist. This has, of course, led to the allegation that it exists as a money-making racket: an online toll booth where they marshal whose ads are seen and whose aren’t—if the price is right. Adblock Plus is very much a self-appointed and self-audited warden of ‘acceptable advertising’.

The second method is to deny access to content upon detection of an ad-blocker forcing the user to either whitelist your website or stop using your website altogether. Consider the case of ArsTechnica, a popular technology blog that tried this experiment, as they blogged here:

Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool. Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn't see our content. We tested just one way of doing this, but have devised a way to keep it rotating were we to want to permanently implement it. But we don't. Socially, the experiment was a mixed bag. A bunch of people whitelisted Ars, and even a few subscribed. And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so. Others rightly criticized the lack of a warning or notification as to what was going on.

A variation on this would be to not block content but load an image with a message below the ad as OkCupid.com does, so that when the ad is removed, that image with a message is shown and could read something like the one at OkCupid.com does:

This allows the user to choose to whitelist your website and thus, keeps control in his/her hands.

The third and best method is to restructure your ads. Instead of banner ads, viral videos, social campaigns, sponsored posts, subscription emails etc. can be the way where consumers self-select into viewing your ads. For example, as ArsTechnica reports here, they manage to keep users seeing ads by getting them to subscribe to their newsletters.

And finally, if you still want to continue with banner ads, there are some best practices as Randall Rathborne notes, that you must ask your webmasters to follow like:

• Ads should only load when they're about to be viewable, not before. Pre-loading ads not in view slows sites down, prioritizing advertising over people's desire to get to the content quickly.
• Retire autoplay in contexts where they become inconvenient. Flashing, blinking intrusive ads also should be avoided.
• Hyperlinks must not lead to any website except the one specified. 2% of words or less must be hyperlinked. Hyperlinks shouldn’t be formatted to behave differently to other links. They shouldn’t be misleading in content or placement.

Blog post by:

Shikhar Nigam

Ankita Verma