Adblockers and what this means for publishers

[Frimley111R]

With the increasing prevalence of ad blocking programs which will have a detrimental affect on advertising revenues, how do you think online publishers which rely heavy on these advertising revenues will react?

[Foliage]

Frimley111R said:

With the increasing prevalence of ad blocking programs which will have a detrimental affect on advertising revenues, how do you think online publishers which rely heavy on these advertising revenues will react?

err what? how do we think they will react?

Perhaps you should have a look and see how they have already reacted...

[jammy_basturd]

I think those that wish to stick to ad revenue based business models with follow The Telegraph's example and whack a big banner asking users to disable their adblocker in order to use the website.

It's actually not that hard to make a website unusable if the user has adblock.

[technodup]

jammy_basturd said:

I think those that wish to stick to ad revenue based business models with follow The Telegraph's example and whack a big banner asking users to disable their adblocker in order to use the website.

It's actually not that hard to make a website unusable if the user has adblock.

Doing that just sends me somewhere else.

Channel 5's (not that I watch a lot of it) player sometimes forces me to switch it off, other times plays fine. When it tries it I just get my fill of poverty porn on Youtube.

The Guardian are begging for 16p a day, Times is paywalled, Telegraph doing their thing. Different solutions but I just work around them or go elsewhere. It's going to be difficult to put the free content genie back in the bottle.

[davepoth]

It's especially difficult in the UK, where we have the BBC website.

[akirk]

I am a publisher and a consumer, and happily run an ad blocker...
I have never in my life clicked on an ad on a website, so not sure what difference it makes to any publisher whether I see the advert I am not going to click on or not... and any website which tells me off for running an ad blocker will rapidly be ditched!

[IATM]

I have to say on a genuine site like BBC 4od I am happy to disable to ad blocker I use.
Again like the last poster I never ever click on an advert on a website HOWEVER when using my mobile and flicking through Facebook I do click on those ads, they seem to be very relevant to me and also show up new things rather than the ad banners on websites which show up the same rubbish I have just been searching and looking at anyway.

[droopsnoot]

I don't click on adverts, but for me the only reason I run one is because without it, some web sites are intolerably slow. PH is one, for example, and I've had other sites where the ad content locks the page out entirely, or throws a security error. I've tried to help by reporting these ads to the site support, who feed it back to their ad supplier, but it doesn't stop. I'd happily let the ads appear if it was non-intrusive.

[jammy_basturd]

I have to admit, PH is the only reason why I run an adblocker. And I put up with the awful adverts on streaming sites!

[Phateuk]

akirk said:

I am a publisher and a consumer, and happily run an ad blocker...
I have never in my life clicked on an ad on a website, so not sure what difference it makes to any publisher whether I see the advert I am not going to click on or not... and any website which tells me off for running an ad blocker will rapidly be ditched!

Not sure if i'm going to get whoosh parrot here, but as a publisher you surely realise the website gets paid (albeit much smaller amount) just for the ad impression irrespective of you clicking?

I personally don't use blockers as I'd like to continue to consume content from the sites I visit, I often purposely click on ads just to support a site I'm reading. It costs me nothing and gains them a few quid.

On the other hand, if it's a random site I've found via googling and it is filled with ads, I'll return to the search and pick another result.

[miniman]

It's pretty simple. Produce content that people can't get anywhere else at the level of quality / insight / whatever. Then gather demographic data about the user base, and serve relevant ads that the user base will tolerate in exchange for the content.

Just like PH used to do

[Tuna]

You've seen that Three are proposing to block all ads to mobile devices on their networks. It's an interesting step that'll no doubt lead to some discussions with Google et. al. and also gets consumers used to a 'nanny network' that treats different content differently. Whilst some people will flock to the network to get ad free content, they shouldn't be surprised if the next step is for Three to charge extra to visit certain sites.

Personally I'm all for paid content - the challenge is getting the price and convenience right. That seems to be working for Netflix, Sky, Amazon, Spotify and others, so those who think they can just sneak off and get cheap content elsewhere may be shocked to find a two tier internet where the good stuff (ie. good production quality, editing, curation, availability and so on) requires a subscription.

If you're in doubt that things are going to change, take a look at this: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizatio...

The summary is: For an unsigned artist to earn US minimum wage, they need to sell 105 CDs a month - or get 700,000 views on YouTube. That tells me two things: 1) Many experienced creatives will not bother creating content for channels that will never pay even minimum wage and 2) If I charge you 2 cents to listen to a track, I'm already earning ten times what Youtube pays.

So the channel that works out how to deliver content for a 'click and forget' payment will be a magnet for content creators. There's a big war brewing over how to attract and retain audiences, so whilst it might be hard to put the 'free' genie back in the bottle, a lot of big players are going to try pretty hard. Publishers are going to be presented with quite a range of alternatives to purely ad driven content in the near future - some of which will go the distance.

[jammy_basturd]

Tuna said:

The summary is: For an unsigned artist to earn US minimum wage, they need to sell 105 CDs a month - or get 700,000 views on YouTube. That tells me two things: 1) Many experienced creatives will not bother creating content for channels that will never pay even minimum wage and 2) If I charge you 2 cents to listen to a track, I'm already earning ten times what Youtube pays.

But such a service would not have many users.

I can listen to 50 tracks on Spotify in a day, easily. At 2p a track that's costing me £1 a day. Why would I use such a service when I can use Spotify for free or Spotify Premium for 1/3rd of the cost?!

[akirk]

Phateuk said:

akirk said:

I am a publisher and a consumer, and happily run an ad blocker...
I have never in my life clicked on an ad on a website, so not sure what difference it makes to any publisher whether I see the advert I am not going to click on or not... and any website which tells me off for running an ad blocker will rapidly be ditched!

Not sure if i'm going to get whoosh parrot here, but as a publisher you surely realise the website gets paid (albeit much smaller amount) just for the ad impression irrespective of you clicking?

I personally don't use blockers as I'd like to continue to consume content from the sites I visit, I often purposely click on ads just to support a site I'm reading. It costs me nothing and gains them a few quid.

On the other hand, if it's a random site I've found via googling and it is filled with ads, I'll return to the search and pick another result.

none of the adverts I run on any of the websites get payment for impressions...
of course that is a model which can exist, but in my experience it is now fairly out of date as it lead to payments without ensuring quality... i.e. stuff them on the front page, SEO the website to bring in 1,000s of irrelevant people as traffic who all bounce, but who have had an ad impression... most advertisers now want to pay against something more substantial - at least time spent on page if nothing else...
but anyway, for those I run - adblockers make no difference if the person would not click anyway...

[0000]

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2016/02/why-stack-o...

[xjay1337]

Tuna said:

Personally I'm all for paid content - the challenge is getting the price and convenience right. That seems to be working for Netflix, Sky, Amazon, Spotify and others, so those who think they can just sneak off and get cheap content elsewhere may be shocked to find a two tier internet where the good stuff (ie. good production quality, editing, curation, availability and so on) requires a subscription.

I'm all for helping people but Netflix, Spotify etc, I don't get adverts.
A lot of the time you get adverts even when you are paying. That is wrong.

[Tuna]

jammy_basturd said:

But such a service would not have many users.

I can listen to 50 tracks on Spotify in a day, easily. At 2p a track that's costing me £1 a day. Why would I use such a service when I can use Spotify for free or Spotify Premium for 1/3rd of the cost?!

You're unusual - most Spotify users listen to around 2 hours a day. In addition those figures are for an unsigned act. For a signed act, 2p a track is 100 times more than they would normally earn. The point stands though that direct payment to artists (through subscription services or whatever) is at least an order of magnitude better paying than ad-supported content, and is more attractive to providers than managing unpredictable ad revenues.

I'm not saying that Spotify is the answer, but more and more users are being moved over to paid services. Three's announcement is probably going to end with a negotiation with Google - either to support specific ads, or to pay them to take the hit. In that case, Three becomes the paid service, and Google provides YouTube et. al as a content channel that is pay per view rather than pay per ad.

At present we're getting to a point where ad-funded content does not pay enough to produce economically. Even things like Apps are marginal for economic returns. The result is that 'free to the user' is going to increasingly mean cheap and nasty, and quality content is going to move to walled gardens and/or higher prices - like Amazon Prime etc. That won't stop people producing 'free to the user' content, but as soon as it has an audience, it'll move elsewhere. The consequence of that is that sites like Medium.com spring up, offering content free of ads purely to build audience.

So I guess what I'm saying is not that you'll be paying 2p a song, but that you almost certainly will be paying through a service rather than through ad funding. Content producers will increasingly benefit from moving away from ad-based revenue to models that allow them to fit in with such services.

[okgo]

Its an interesting time. I work in online advertising, specifically on phones, though I have worked on websites (its been mentioned above, in fact), we have a slightly easier time of it on mobile as the apps were just blocked at the time, or removed via pressure from certain parties.

I think many are underestimating the power of advertising without knowing it, even if you don't click on it, when you keep seeing the same message on TV, newspapers, mobile, desktop, tablet, outdoor it all builds an awareness, it might not even seem like it, but subconsciously it happens, and the placements that brands take out all help with this, as an example - Chanel told us they would ONLY be shown on a page related to the Olympics that was showing content about someone winning, nothing less, they wanted a positive association.

The reason Facebook are so powerful and they're smashing the market is because they are one of the few that 'know' without any doubt that you are the same user across various platforms thanks to them having sign in data. So while cookies are not that effective on mobile, and the tracking of users converting that come from an app and land on a mobile web page barely works at all - facebook can see that you have been looking at a certain thing on your pc (as well as many others who will also have their pixel there waiting to be dropped on you to be profiled) a jumper or something, they then are able to re-target you when you appear on mobile, they know its you as you're signed in on both devices, you keep doing this on one device, and you keep being hit on the others with stuff you have been looking at - suddenly you think its relevant.

As covered above though, everyone is trying a different approach, whether its 'membership' which with certain titles that have a fairly devoted audience will probably work, guardian, telegraph etc, many of those readers will not want to start consuming their news from other sites. The same way someone who buys the same paper each day wouldn't start buying a different one without considerable shift in attitude etc. Personally I think the way many sites will and are getting round this will be through more native formats, more partnerships and sponsorships of sections and various things that go beyond the average banner ad etc. But I think miniman is about right above, if you know your audience, and you're able to sell to the ad agencies effectively, you at least will be reaching the right user with something that is relevant to them.

[Don]

Welll I stopped my Telegraph subscription because their content was ste and I hated the ads. AdBlock+ is installed on every last computer I have and is set to block all ads and STILL some turn up.

The Torygraph site in particular is unusable without Adblock+.

On the other hand I pay for walkingworld (£16 a year). Its content is excellent and it is ad free. They get my money every year.

[miniman]

And here is what you have when publishers fk it up:

http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...