The great philosopher Homer Simpson once memorably described
alcohol as “the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”
Internet advertising is a bit like that — the funder of and terrible
nuisance baked into everything you do online.
Advertising
sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, not least
this very newspaper and its handsome, charming technology columnist; as I’ve argued before,
many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about
without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast,
hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile
you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet.
Now, more and more web users are escaping the daily bombardment of
online advertising by installing an ad blocker. This simple, free
software lets you roam the web without encountering any ads that shunt
themselves between you and the content you want to read or watch. With
an ad blocker, your web browser will generally run faster, you’ll waste
less bandwidth downloading ads, and you’ll suffer fewer annoyances when
navigating the Internet. You’ll wonder why everyone else in the world
doesn’t turn to the dark side.
Well, everyone may be catching on. Ad blocking has been around for years, but adoption is now rising steeply,
at a pace that some in the ad industry say could prove catastrophic for
the economic structure underlying the web. That has spurred a debate about the ethic of ad blocking.
Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit
contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free
content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.
But
in the long run, there could be a hidden benefit to blocking ads for
advertisers and publishers: Ad blockers could end up saving the ad
industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad
industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive
and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data — or
risk getting blocked forever if they fail.
“It’s clear to us that the ads ecosystem is broken,” said Ben Williams, a spokesman for Eyeo, the German company that makes Adblock Plus,
the most popular ad-blocking software. “What we need is a sea change in
the industry to get to a place where we have a good amount of better
ads out there, ads that users accept.”
The industry may not have much time to wait. In a report
last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks
ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22
billion in revenue this year. Nearly 200 million people worldwide
regularly block ads, the report said, and the number is growing fast,
increasing 41 percent globally in the last year.
Today
ad-blocking is mostly restricted to desktop web browsers. But iOS 9,
Apple’s latest mobile operating system, will include support for ad
blockers when it becomes available in the fall. Several ad-blocking
firms are already creating apps for the new OS; when it’s out, you’ll
simply download an ad blocker and no longer have to see ads on the
iPhone’s version of Safari and possibly in other apps that open web
links.
“What’s
likely to happen is that of the 200 million people who use ad blocking
now, let’s say half of them have iPhones — they’re all going to install
one of these things,” said Sean Blanchfield, the chief executive of
PageFair. “Then they’ll start telling all their friends about this
amazing app that saves your battery, saves your data and speeds up the
web, and it’s likely to go viral. A lot of people are going to get
accustomed to having an ad-free mobile experience.”
It’s important to note that PageFair has skin in this game, and some have accused the company of self-interested alarmism.
PageFair
also sells technology that allows web publishers to determine if users
are running blocking software — and then serves them ads anyway, going
around the blockers. PageFair’s software, which Mr. Blanchfield said is
currently being tested with a number of large websites, circumvents ad
blocking by using “low-level networking” technology that he declined to
detail in order to stay ahead of ad companies.
Showing
ads to people who have downloaded ad blockers sounds a little spammy.
But in a twist, it may also lead to better ads. Here’s how: PageFair’s
canny strategy to mitigate users’ outrage is that it will only show ads
that aren’t “intrusive,” Mr. Blanchfield said. That means the ads won’t
feature animations, they won’t block content, and they won’t load
“trackers” that monitor and report back to some unknown server what you
do on a web page.
By
requiring companies to run ads that are simple and transparent, Mr.
Blanchfield said, PageFair would return sanity to the ad business. “We
as an industry have lost the trust of our users, who are right — there
are a lot of very bad ads out there,” he said. “We have one shot as an
industry to get this right.”
PageFair is just one of the firms trying to create an ecosystem that produces better ads. After wrestling with the implications of their software, the founders of AdBlock Plus created an initiative called “Acceptable Ads,”
which sets out a standard for ads that the software will let users see
despite having ad-blocking turned on. These ads are also low-fi — they
can’t be animated or cover up a page’s content. (Eyeo charges some large
companies a fee to show these ads; Google, for instance, pays Eyeo to
have its search ads show up for Adblock Plus users.)
Then there’s Ghostery,
which makes a plug-in that lets users find and block online tracking
tools — the code in a page that sends data about your surfing habits to
marketers. According to the company, the number of such trackers has
exploded in recent years because marketing software used to analyze
consumer behavior has become much easier to use. Ghostery reported 22 trackers on a page for Slate, 18 on one for Business Insider, 22 at The Wall Street Journal, and 26 for The New York Times.
Not only do these trackers represent efforts to profile you, but they also waste time
— when you see a web page stuck loading, you can usually blame one of
these trackers. Ghostery aims to fix that. For a fee, the company
reports to site owners which trackers are slowing down pages — which in
turn may improve how ads are served. It will also soon unveil a
“Ghostery score” that will show users which sites to trust based on the
trackers that sites are loading up.
The
pattern here is ironic: PageFair, AdBlock Plus and Ghostery, which all
depend to some extent on consumers’ interest in blocking ads, are also
all pushing innovative efforts to create better ads.
Even
some in the ad industry acknowledge this dynamic. Scott Cunningham, the
general manager of the technology lab for the Interactive Advertising
Bureau, the trade group that comes up with online advertising standards,
said his group had already begun to respond to users who are
downloading the software; most recently, he said, the bureau has been
working to create clearer guidelines for the trackers’ coded web pages.
“As
we’ve watched the incidence rate of ad blocking, we’ve said, ‘O.K.,
it’s time for us to put the clamps onto some of the areas we haven’t
addressed yet,’ ” Mr. Cunningham said.
That
suggests another practical utility of ad blocking — it appears to be an
effective form of protest. For better ads tomorrow, block ads today.
Correction: August 19, 2015
An earlier version of this column misstated part of the name of an online advertising trade group. It is the Interactive Advertising Bureau, not Internet Advertising Bureau.
An earlier version of this column misstated part of the name of an online advertising trade group. It is the Interactive Advertising Bureau, not Internet Advertising Bureau.
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