Adblocking remains the bane of several publishers and advertisers’ lives, with the climbing software use place to cost the industry $27bn (#18bn) in lost revenues by 2020. Where adoption has risen by 82 percent in the previous year, it is certainly a major deal in the UK.
Two bodiesbeen trying to counteract this danger are Digital Content Next and alternative PageFair. They have been hosting a series of round talks from 2015 onward with industry leaders such as Mozilla Google, both the European Commission and UK government, to look at what can be done to improve the situation.
Seven recommendations
The seven recommendations reflect a majority opinion from the stakeholders at the recent meeting at MEC Global in New York:
- On the blocked web, the consumer must have instant tools to reject and whine about advertisements
- instead of restore all ads on the blocked internet, just a limited number of top advertising slots should be revived. This will make a much better effect for brands, tidy up the consumer experience and incentivise better creative
- Blocked web may provide the opp to set a new form of above the line advertising
- Contextual targeting can be used on the blocked web to establish advertisement importance if other forms of monitoring are not practical or desirable
- On the blocked web, where third party monitoring is mostly blocked, publishers may create new value by participating with their users to elicit volunteered data
- Measuring advertising success on the blocked web with broad top-of-funnel metrics may incentivise buyers to concentrate on value rather than cheapness. Another advantage is that such metrics (instance: participation time) can be merged across digital and nondigital media
- online as a whole there must be a maximum page loading time regular that publishers and advertisers both commit to. The Developing hazard of adblocking may incentivise this
Head of ecosystem in PageFair Dr Johnny Ryan recently blogged saying the blocked web rather than being exclusively for their detriment.
“Taken together, these points provide publishers a chance to sustain themselves beyond adblocking, which will bring new value to advertisers while respecting the user,” he wrote.
The internet has become so cluttered that brands need to scream over each other on a webpage to cut through. It has prompted a consumer backlash
The chance Dr Ryan mentioned was that of a whole brand new, ‘uncluttered’ region of the internet. He said it was a “fresh and separate opportunity to respond to blockers with contextual targeting that does not track consumers, and to communicate on a new and uncluttered area online”.
Marketing Tech News talked to Dr Ryan about the recommendations of exploiting this opportunity, and the ethical implication. He said there is a need save the open web and to keep publishers afloat.
Save the open internet
“The mechanism that has supported the open internet for twenty years is beginning to break down. We’re focussed on protecting the future of the Internet that was open and on re-establishing a deal between publishers and users. We have to have a means to honor customers and also to encourage publishers if we are going to conserve the Internet. If this sounds stark reflect on USENET. The internet can perish. I feel that it needs to be saved,” he explained.
In response to adblocking, some publishers have chosen to put adblock walls up. However, these only result in a “short term gain” according to Dr Ryan.
“It ends away 60-90 percent of adblock users in the website. Clearly it would be better to let these users on one’s site and show them a restricted number of respectful ads,” he advised Marketing Tech News.
In adblocking software generally speaking the development, Dr Ryan adds, is right down to ad practices such as snooping on consumers’ data, advertisements jumping around their screens, slowing their servers, using up data that is expensive, and exposing the computer.
“But in addition, the net has become so cluttered that manufacturers need to scream over each other on a page to cut through. This has prompted a consumer backlash, and it has also not worked nicely for publishers or for brands.”
What’s your stance on the adblocking scenario? Drop us a comment below.
