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In Battle With Ad Blockers, Ad Industry Fesses Up To Alienating Users (iab.com)
itwbennett writes: In a post on the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) website Thursday, Scott Cunningham, senior vice president of technology of IAB and general manager of its Tech Lab, issued what amounts to an apology for "[losing] track of the user experience" and called on advertisers "to do better." But it may be a case of too little, too late as "a report (PDF) released in August forecasted that U.S. websites will lose US$21.8 billion in ad revenue this year due to ad blockers," writes Jeremy Kirk.
Thank goodness you speak for every advertising agency and website operator in the world. I guess we can expect a more balanced approach from here on out.
U.S. websites will lose US$21.8 billion in ad revenue this year due to ad blockers
Advertisers saved US$21.8 billion by not advertising to unreceptive customers
Talk about missing the root cause. Ad blockers are only used because publishers have gone so ridiculously over the top in creating annoying, high bandwidth, high cpu-usage ads.
Not making the ridiculously over-inflated revenue you feel entitled to, and which is based on bullshit assumptions is not "losing revenue".
Acting like you deserved or earned that money in any way shape or form is your damned problem. Having reality bit you in the ass is also your damned problem.
Sorry, but pulling a number out of your ass and saying you feel entitled to $21 billion dollars has nothing at all to do with reality. Get a real business model and earn your money, don't just decree that you being a parasite embedded on a web page entitles you to a damned thing.
No, no it didn't. A bunch of sleazy assholes selling ads is nothing of the sort.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Users: hey can you give us less intrusive and annoying ads
Advertisers: fuck you here is your ad
Now
advertisers: hey please don't block our ads thanks
Users: fuck you
"U.S. websites will lose US$21.8 billion in ad revenue this year due to ad blockers"
No, U.S. websites won't make an additional $21.8 billion in ad revenue due to ad blockers.
You can't lose what you don't already have. This sounds like entertainment industry economics.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
The unfortunate truth is that once someone experiences the speed and cleanliness of adblocking, they simply won't go back. Not ever.
And, as explained in a previous post, the second thing they do is show their friends. And their relatives. And their social contacts.
And so it expands, like neutrons in a nuclear warhead; the chain-reaction gain is greater than 1 and the constraint of business models
("we don't take your word for the claim that the ad was shown") will either have to break down, or the whole business is "game over".
My advice to webvertizers: update your resume and find another line of work.
The problem is that they don't want to do anything substantial to vet the people buying the ads. All they care about is the money.
It seems to me like there needs to be some sort of significant penalty for any ad network found to have let something malicious slip through, otherwise they have very little incentive to clean their act up. They'll just go "oops, well, we won't sell ad space to CyberMafiaMan2000@gmail anymore", and turn right around and sell it to CyberMafiaMan2001@gmail instead.
The ad industry really sucks at their job (especially Internet ads). Their job is to make consumers LIKE them, to WANT to watch the ads and buy their products, but they end up having the opposite effect.
Imagine if you are a software developer, and instead of writing new code, you find yourself regularly deleting code that others wrote on your team (and all available backups), forcing them to re-do their work. If you were this bad at your job, would you expect to make any money?
The ad industry is faced with several huge problems:
1. Ads take up too much bandwidth. They need to use more efficient content formats (yes, even if that means IE6 users can't see the ads), compress ads (yes, even very lossy compression) to reduce their size, and improve caching behavior, so they have absolutely minimal performance impact.
2. Companies that produce ads or aggregate ads from disparate sources do a very piss-poor job of vetting ads to make sure there is no malicious code in the ad. Hijacking links, CSRF, drive-by downloads, ad chaining from one site to another, opening more ads upon closing existing ones, and links to explicit content are very common. These are malware behaviors, people. Advertisements intended for paying customers should be much more respectful of the consumer's personal space and *not* make every possible attempt to invade their system and prevent them from closing the ads.
3. Most ads that we view are not relevant to us. We would never buy whatever is being sold, either because we know it's trash, or we're simply not in the market for that type of product (selling women's dresses to single guys, gaming mice to grannies, etc.)
4. User trust in the ad system as a whole is at an all-time low, mostly due to the past effects of attempted identity theft, personal information exfiltration and malware installation attempts of a large proportion of the ad networks.
These factors mean that users are left with two alternatives: either don't visit websites that display ads, or use an ad blocker.
If the ad industry can't come together as a cohesive whole and actively seek to eliminate these bad actors within their industry, their negative influence is going to continue to drive users to block ads, even if a significant portion of the ad industry completely cleans up their act.
At this point, the only ads I can tolerate are Youtube ads which can be skipped after 5 seconds. Not only are they sometimes relevant, but they're much more pleasant to watch than most of the annoying popups out there, and they come and go very fast if I'm not interested (5 seconds is a rounding error since the video might take that long to buffer anyway). Not only that, but they are also rendered using the same efficient codecs that Youtube uses. I've even stopped to watch one or two full ads.
Imagine if 95% of car mechanics at car dealerships deliberately tried to screw you by saying things are broken that aren't (deliberate lying, not accidental misdiagnosis). How many people would trust mechanics vs. trying to fix it themselves or asking for a trusted friend's help? Most people would not be willing to bring their car into the dealer in this case. In reality there's still a significant percentage of bad apples out there, but I think it's much lower than 95%. Unfortunately, in the ad industry, the percentage of bad apples is very, very high, and the percentage of people trying to do the right thing is very, very low.
They'll go after the ad block authors, first with incentives, then with threats. They'll try to get laws passed, they'll try to hook into existing property rights violations like DMCA. They'll fight and fight to shit up your life because they've been able to get paid for it up until this point.
We'd better have a plan for all of these points!
Presumably because people want evidence what they're paying for works. They want to know so many people saw it, so many people clicked on it, and some percentage actually bought it.
Digital advertising pretends like it is their "right" to know these things, and to track all the places you go so they can better know what to sell you.
The rest of us have decided "no, really, fuck you, where I go and what I do isn't your damned business". Which means we'll block the hell out of these analytics companies as much as possible, because we don't agree with the premise that we've consented to be part of their business model.
So, if a website serves ads, which don't run scripts, and which are served up with their own bandwidth? I might not take extraordinary steps to block them. Start pulling in god knows what from a dozen other sites who all want to set cookies, run scripts, and track me everywhere I go? I'll block that crap all day long.
If your business model is predicated on my participation, you should not be surprised that my participation is neither mandatory, nor beneficial to me.
The problem is the ad companies feel entitled to this information. People are now starting to tell them that's not true.
There's at least 10 external sites on Slashdot. The business model of none of these companies concerns me. The children of the employees of Scorecard Research can starve alone in the streets for all I care; it's not my problem to supply Scorecard Research with any information or be the basis for their revenue stream.
To the people they advertise to, these companies are nothing but parasites on the internet. And that's their damned problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Make it a malware filter instead of an adblocker. Freely configurable, of course, so "the cloud" can add malware as it is found.
Unfortunately some nefarious elements might add benign, wholesome advertising sites...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hold sites and ad networks accountable for the shit they serve. If they're serving malware, penalize them.
Yes, exactly.
Then we have no choice but to conclude they're a bunch of greedy, self-serving bastards who don't give a damn about our security, privcy, or the perception they're part of the problem.
Which is what we've done, and why we run ad-blockers.
Are you suggesting we should be giving the benefit of the doubt or saying they didn't meant to do it and it isn't their fault if sleazy players delivered malware? Why the hell would we do that?
Sorry, I'm sticking with the conclusion I've already made: I simply refuse to trust the integrity or security of an ad network, and I owe them no obligation to do otherwise, and I don't give a crap about their business model or revenue stream.
If the ad companies won't take responsibility, then they cannot be trusted even a little. And that becomes their own damned problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.