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Online Advertising Is Threatening an Open Internet
The internet is in a very sad state. Recent measures introduced by governments around the world, including C-51, TPP, and previous bills introduced such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), threaten the rights to a free and open internet. However, much less talked about is the current state of online advertising and how it's slowly eroding our rights to browse online through disabling content for those using ad-blockers, paywalls and invasive tactics to market products based on our browsing history.
Advertising is the life blood of a free and open internet. It has helped break down barriers to information that was once only accessible to the developed world and has helped fund and foster unique apps that billions of people use on a daily basis. However, ad-blocking has gone main stream and has become a serious threat to continued development of the internet and its applications.
Ad-blocking is not a new problem; it has been mainstream for years. However, the problem was typically isolated to desktops. Apple set a recent precedent, by accidentally allowing the approval of a new app, known as Been Choice, into the iTunes App Store. The app claims to block advertisements not only in mobile applications, but also in native mobile apps, including Facebook and even Apple’s own News application. This is the first app of its kind in the mobile space, with many more expected to pop-up in the near future.
Browsing the web without ads is not just nice, it’s liberating. No popups stealing your screen. No accidental clicks taking you away to a non-relevant site. No auto-playing video ads making the page load as slowly as if it were being dialed up through America Online circa 1999. Online advertising has become so invasive that consumers are taking matters into their own hands. Over 198 million consumers agree by actively employing ad blocking software, and that number is growing at 41% annually.
PageFair paints a scary picture for online publishers with some facts on the current state of ad blocking:
- Ad blocking estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion during 2015.
- 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.
An Israeli ad-blocking company, Shine, even went as far as denouncing the US advertising trade body, Interactive Advertising Bureau, with a provocative print ad in the Financial Times.
What can be done?
Advertisers and publishers are currently employing the following ideas to help reduce the relevance of ad blocking, however, none improve the overall customer experience of an open and free web.
One solution among advertisers is to pay off ad blockers. This is akin to paying off the mob for protection. What’s to stop ad blockers from increasing rates? This also impacts the spirit of net neutrality. Smaller advertisers and networks will be crowded out by large, well funded advertisers. This does not change the way advertisers and publishers deliver ads.
Integrated, organic content.
Many publishers and advertisers are turning to paid advertorials or sponsored posts, ad blockers have a difficult time recognizing these types of content as advertisings. Rather than forcing users to view this content, users have a choice to view and actively engage with the content. However, deciphering between a regular post or paid ad could be deceptive and publishers need to be actively engaged with businesses to generate content and funds.
Oh pretty please, turn off that ad blocker.
Why not just ask users to disable ad blockers with a pop-up? Appeal to a users’ sense of duty by educating them on the dangers of ad blocking and how it endangers a publishers’ business. According to Jordan Whelan at Grey Smoke Media, “Consumers don’t interact in the way you would like them to, many will see educational pop-ups as additional advertising, further impacting traffic, engagement and conversion levels.” Like other solutions presented by advertisers, asking for permission does not fix the way advertisers and publishers engage with their users, ads are still plentiful and invasive.
Block Content from People Who Use Ad Blockers
This is draconian and exactly what the world was getting away from as we moved online. By playing bad cop with ad blocking users, you run the risk of driving traffic away, further impacting the ability to monetize your creative work.
The Freemium Model
Freemium is a pricing strategy that offers the basic product or service for free of charge, but charging for more advanced features. One company famous for this is Spotify, a digital music service that offers a free, ad-supported version and a paid, ad-free version. If people are so anti-ads, maybe they’ll pay a few dollars a month for a paid, ad-free version. Subscription services typically account for a small portion of revenues. Tech start-ups and blog sites are able to grow so rapidly due to providing creative, unique content for free on a continuing basis. Even a service as massive as Spotify relies heavily on their ad-support service for user growth and revenues.
With the solutions above, advertisers and publishers are blaming users. The issue at heart is the invasiveness of advertisements in the daily life of consumers. The ad industry has shown a total lack of respect for the audience they want to monetize. Rather than forcing products down our throat, advertisers need to look at more organic solutions for consumer outreach.
One ad network platform that is evolving to meet the needs of consumers is Framestr. Unlike traditional ads that re-direct traffic off-site, users can view more information or even purchase a product directly from a pop-up window. The publisher receives the affiliate commission, set by the vendor, and 50% of ad revenues paid by the vendor. Rather than re-marketing, publishers set the type of products they want to advertise to their user base, say good bye to personal injury lawyer toronto ads on fashion blogs.
Unless advertisers and publishers start working together to provide unique, engaging content that provides value to customers, more and more customers will be driven to ad blockers and other services that improve their web experience. I implore advertisers to think outside the box for solutions that improve the overall web experience while keeping the internet open and free to each and every user around the globe.
This piece was written by Chris Porteous, co-founder of digital marketing agency Grey Smoke Media in Toronto.
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Not sure what you guys are using.
I only have Ghostry installed. It updates every so often. Bandwidth intensive ads are no longer a problem.
ghostery and ad block on Firefox... no complaints on my end.
My Firefox gets bogged down all the time with all the b.s. that must load with the page. Ghostery works on some sites but blocks content on others, so it's a constant guessing game of which widget is which and whether to "whitelist" a site. IMO web publishers have indeed jumped the shark and I'll bet push ads are the #1 complaint of Internet users.
I guess I'll need to write a primer on this. View the page source, find the offending link, add that to your list of blockable items. Especially if you visit a web site frequenty that pulls this shit.
Quick and dirty.RT clk/ Inspect element clk and if you started on the offender it's node is highlighted rt clk/chose deleate node. 9 out of 10 will cure you for that visit.
Hey cheech,
Check out Pale Moon, it's a fork of FF that gets rid of a lot of the behind the scenes stuff.
OBTW: It also gets rid of Australis...
Spoctor Din
Pale Moon is great. Looks like Firefox at version 28, before they made it unusable.
Also, install the NoScript add-on to block ad sites or malicious Javascript.
OK, no problem. Just give me an unlimited Internet connection free of charge.
But if some one charges any fee for an Internet acces - just f..k off.
I pay huge dollars a month for Cable tv and on the bottom of my screen there is advertisments. How much extra do I need to pay to be left the fuck alone from these scum?
You tube is terrible as well, Fuck Youtube! someone please Start a new you tube that respects the viewer and does not force banner ads or force you to watch a video before you can watch what you came here for!
Network news sites here in Canada force you to watch some advertising before they will play the news vid that you came here for...
Usually I watch multiple vids at once, silencing the ones playing the commercials until they are done and then watching the desired video...
To all these scum out there there should be laws stopping these scum from using up our bandwidth!!!
How much would a coke or a pepsi cost if they just stopped ramming these advertisements down our throat? How much better would there profits be?
I know coke and pepsi exist, I will drink one of them when I want to, not because I see an ad!
To all advertisers... the internet is not for you, it is for us, and I will not watch your ad's no matter what!
I have an older Mac I'm trying to stretch its useful life.
I can no longer use Chrome or Safari to view ZH...so bad are some of the intrusive ads that I am forced to quit the browser. Firefox with Umatrix has eliminated this problem.
When there are so many ads that the experience is ruined, then the problem is pure greed...not the viewer.
This ad thing is way out of hand. I never watch TV due to the wasted time ads consume. The majority of internet sites seem to be going the way of ABC, CBS, NBC.
Check this out:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/15/01/18/0547230/why-run-linux-on-macs
It's what I would do...
Also, see my above posts
Spoctor Din
Linux will fix all problems. It's easy to use now, too.
Today's ad mess is the direct result of many of the problems that plague humans in other domains:
1) arms race
2) tragedy of the commons
3) total lack of empathy towards the customers' plight (businesses want money from their customers without providing commensurate value in return--really, if websites could get away with it, they would provide zero content and 100% ads, and they are trying to reach that ratio without regard for their customers).
We won't solve this any time soon, and certainly not with ad blockers. No one has solved the arms race problem in many other domains where the stakes are much higher, as in real arms races with nuclear weapons, etc.
online adds used to be a edge.
Now companies blame their decreasing sales on the lack of online adds so they invest vast amounts of money in it that don't return it.
It now takes 1 dollar to get 2 dollars in sales.
50% OF YOUR TURNOVER GOES TO ONLINE COMPANIES!!!
So whatever you sell online through adds, you sell at a massive loss.
But as there aren't any real ROI calculators out there, and the digital marketeer don't want it because it only proves their job is useless, people will keep pumping money into it.
And money always go to A or B. That means companies invest less money in real salespeople and their sales go down even more.
And what do they say? LET'S INVEST MORE ONLINE!!!
What a joke....
CEO's watching their likes on their corporate facebook site like a kid...
track the google alerts to see how many times they're mentioned...
There's only a few that are profitable online. 1 in a 100.
And damn it cost a shitload to get a corporate ecommerce site online.
Even those freebe ecommerce sites are expensive as they all take percentages of the sales.
It's like the goldfever in the 19th century, the only once who are getting rich from it are those who are selling the shovels.
I hate advertisements and pop-ups and the like. If I wanted to buy something, I would find it.
It seems unruly to me that I have to pay for a tv signal and then they get to shove adds in my face. I don't want to pay for adds in my face, on tv or the internet. I don't want to pay someone to try to sell me stuff I don't want. Advertising doesn't work on me as well as they think it does.
Remember the Geico commercial with the Camel saying "what day is it"? That was funny, and I watched and shared it. Stupid modern, laugh box, play on shit tv doesn't sell me anything.
How much would I have to pay for tv, radio, and internet without adds? Or being tracked?
And before someone says it, I went nearly two decades without tv. I have dvr, and I would rather get rid of my wide screen than watch adds. I only read when travelling, or internet, I will not watch hotel tv with adds.
What it will take to fix the country, the people would not be willing to do IMHO. The signal towers need to come down, and get rid of the smart phones. It ain't happening. 1984 baby
Pop-up ads make my ass twitch, and NOT in a good way. Ads are worse then hemorrhoids.
Advertising is the life blood of a free and open internet.
I disagree. The internet was just fine before this insidious advertising bombardment began. We all pay quite a lot of money to support the infrastructure through monthly fees to "service providers", while advertising chokes up our connections and saps our bandwidth. We pay for it twice, and the "service providers" want to throttle our connections instead of limiting the advertising.
Fuck advertising. It is a disease vector that blights the internet.
It is worth noting the Facebook and Google, the two major destroyers of the true internet and the entry point for advertising, were started with oligarch/Deep State money. All advertising money flows from Google, and this is the source of the infestation that blocks people from open communication.
+1
"We pay for it twice, and the "service providers" want to throttle our connections instead of limiting the advertising."
Yeah, nothing waves a dick in your face like a smartphone 'data plan' that charges for ad content downloaded using the same residential wireless connection you're already paying a monthly fee to maintain.
It's like the pizzeria charging you a delivery fee for takeout you've picked up yourself.
Adverts used to be unobtrusive banners on websites and that I could live with, but the ad’s got stupid! You must sit through ads before you watch video content, videos playing while you browse a page, so many pop ups on your screen it looks like space invaders and those annoying pop up boxes that follow your cursor around. I installed Adblock and it makes the online experience far better. Some sites block me due to having Adblock installed and that’s fine I will no longer visit. If the ad’s had not got stupidly in my face I would not have needed Adblock.
I'm telling you the "Net Neutrality Law" is really the "Net Preferentialality Law"; where corporations are the preferred.
This is no such thing nor has there of Internet Privacy; ever bother to actually read the "Privacy Policy"; those are misnomers and should read "Personal Information Usage Agreement" because that is what almost ALL of them are. Definitely on 98% of all Apps.
"Advertising is the life blood of a free and open internet."
Flat out lie.
Ad blockers are the equivalent of the mute button on a TV remote. Maybe it's because I started on the internet way pre-browser, with dial up and the dear old W.E.L.L., but if a site tries to work around my ad blocker, I just go elsewhere. On my notebook, ZH is almost unusable slow without dear old Super AdBlock and Chrome (works in FireFox as well). And yes, I did contribute fiat money to the AdBlock folks, love that program.
At least in the USSA, we are deluged in ads - driving down the freeway, on the radio, watching the game on TV, and newspapers - buy a Sunday paper recently? I want at least my internet to be ad free, and it is. You advertisers want to put 'sponsored content' on a site, that I can chose to click on or not? Fine.
But get your fucking ads out of my face, or I'm gone.
I can't visit ZH on either of my tablets. The newer tablet takes forever to load all the popups, and the older Android tablet starts playing some commercial that I can't stop, and never get to see the ZH content. Way to go.
NoScript
+FireFox - Flash ads won't even load. Superfast!
Now if only there was an adblocker for TV.
I almost forget how annoying it was for my comp to get hijacked by forced video ads before using Adblockers.
Face it guys. You crapped in your own play sandbox.
Bill Hicks.....genius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jemqAtxKyAo
Every site that contains a facebook like button sends every keystroke you make to the facebook servers where it's shared with our nsa buddies.
And that makes you think as every site I know has them.
Then there's the html5 sites that send 100% of their info to the google servers... wich will also soon be almost every site or your site won't be shown on google anymore.
In short, when your laptop is on, it's spying on you.
So when you hear people: HEY DON'T USE THE CLOUD BECAUSE THEY SPY ON YOUR DATA!!...
just smile...
because even without it, everything you do is send directly to those that are interested.
And the next gen laptops are just like the tablets, they only operate well on the cloud and their hdd disks will make sure that otherwise it all goes to slow.
And the sdd disks? HA! A entire disk is transfered in 30 minutes when you surf the internet.
And when you install crap like the Mcaffee anti virus programms... it transfers about a gig a day from my laptop. I have no clue what it's sending but my guess it's every new file that is created.
And a secret service is one thing but when they sell my data without me knowing to marketing firms, it is because they do lack the ethics.
"my"
And as such is Theft. Unless you are getting compensated.
Ad servers are, at best, slow and undependable, and now they are being invaded by malware. If they were a little less obnoxious and if there were fewer fluff sites that are just click bait, things might be a bit different......
I need a stupid article blocker.