Adblock Plus: Future or Ruin of Online Advertising?

Online advertising can often be invasive, annoying, overly abundant, and, as a result, counterproductive in itself. However, without its existence, there would hardly be any websites. And in the midst of that dilemma, Adblock Plus appeared ten years ago, an extension that allows users to browse without ads appearing on their screens.

Surely you have found yourself on a website with so many banners that it was hard to find what you were really looking for there, right?

As expected, this free application, customizable by filters and available for most browsers, was welcomed with open arms by users worldwide (over 100 million currently), while digital media, websites that live entirely or partly off advertising, and advertisers began to see their future seriously threatened.

What do you think? Would you install it (if you haven't already) or do you consider it condemning the sites you visit to disappear?

The Acceptable Ads Project by Adblock Plus

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind the undisputed king of ad blockers, has been criticized for using what many consider extortion tactics, charging what they call "big entities," such as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, in exchange for including them in their so-called whitelist, meaning those sites whose ads are allowed to be seen, theoretically as long as they are not considered annoying.

What are their criteria for determining whether ads are intrusive or not? They attribute them generically to what is agreed upon by their own users and maintain that access to the whitelist can never be bought. For instance, they even specify the size, format, and placement that your ads must have.

The definition of "acceptable advertising" as an option in their tool refers to "non-animated ads, clearly identified as such and that do not interrupt, for example, the reading of an article.”

In any case, the software still offers the possibility to block everything for those who wish to do so, including YouTube video ads, Facebook ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc. It also allows disabling social media buttons on websites, malware, and retargeting tracking.

In fact, they do not hold back and suggest that if everyone activated the option to not see anything, advertisers would "have an incentive to create better advertising.”

However, according to data from Adblock Plus itself, only one in four people who use their blocker is in favor of not seeing any advertising at all. The rest of the users accept seeing non-intrusive ads in order to help the survival of the websites they visit. Not everything is lost; there is still faith in humanity 😉

The Responses from Advertisers and Media

In such a delicate situation, illustrated by losses of 22 billion in advertising revenue in 2015 due to Adblock Plus, media, startups, websites, and advertisers have no choice but to react. The responses have been as diverse as they are different in effectiveness.

"Advertising is dead, and advertising killed it," titled a visionary article published back in 2013 by fastcompany.com.

IAB Spain, the association representing the advertising and digital communication sector in Spain, acknowledged its mistakes and proposed a program called LEAN (Light-Encripted-Ad Choice Supported-Non-Invasive Ads) with the aim of combining commercial content with a good user experience, thus preventing the spread of "ad blockers".

This entire system necessarily involves abandoning the bad habits that have led to this dead end and a determined commitment to creativity.

Many digital media, in the midst of the economic crisis and without a clear business model, opened the floodgates to anything goes in their eagerness to make money by any means, creating in many cases a huge advertising pollution on their pages.

On mobile devices, for example, it is not only that the saturation of ads visually becomes a fair of flashing lights and colors, but it directly affects the loading time of the website and, therefore, data consumption, or in other words, the user's wallet.

When one falls into these details, the adblocker solution seems, from the user's perspective, almost a blessing even if it means that the just pay for the sins of the unjust.

Now it is time to reverse that through methods such as the so-called native advertising, which integrates by blending into the ecosystem of each website; the use of Big Data for more specific and well-targeted campaigns; or raising user awareness by asking them to disable the blocker when visiting your page. That is, to include you in their personal whitelist. The message is usually accompanied by a reminder explaining that without advertising, the viability of your website is null.

Little has served this deterrent system, as "anti Adblock killers" have quickly emerged, which prevent the activation of this script. In the jungle that is the Internet, there are also those who offer an application that, when installed, prevents Adblock from hiding your advertising, but in exchange for including some ads. More wood.

Another of the adopted solutions is the implementation of a freemium model, where the user makes a payment in exchange for accessing content without advertising, as is the case with Spotify.

At the most radical extreme, the measure of blocking access to your website to any user who blocks your advertising also does not seem to yield fruitful results for those who have implemented it.

And then the ad blocker sold advertising

Recently, it was revealed that Adblock Plus, in an unexpected plot twist, was going to launch its own advertising marketing platform. Or in other words: putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. The decision comes after a battle with Facebook, which managed to neutralize the action of ad blockers.

Although initially Google and AppNexus were going to embark on this new adventure with Adblock Plus, the great controversy raised around the absurdity of a blocker selling advertising has caused them to jump from the project, forcing a postponement of its launch, initially until this December.

According to Adblock Plus, there are already nearly a thousand publishers interested in their project for buying and selling non-intrusive online ads, named Acceptable Ads Exchange.

The concept is simple: the website containing aggressive ads can replace them with others that are not through their "marketplace". 80% of the revenue would go to the media and the remaining 20% to intermediaries, of which 6% would go to the blocker.

In case it wasn't enough of a twist, Adblock Plus has recently shown advertising on its own commercial blocking page. The advertiser has been Netflix and it did so to promote the series "Black Mirror" with the following message: "Hello, ad blocker user. You can't see the ad, but the ad can see you. What's on the other side of your black mirror?"

Regardless of whether their actions are ethically or morally reprehensible - the courts have already ruled in their favor several times - no one can deny Adblock Plus's game vision.

We will see what happens. Would you join this new commercial platform or do you prefer the already known alternatives?