Ad blocking. Be careful what you wish for.

Ad Blockers (like AdBlock and AdBlockPlus) have been with us for a number of years and their adoption has grown steadily over time, as has the quality of the product. Earlier versions were interruptive to the user experience, leaving gaps in the pages where the ads were supposed to be, whilst the newer versions are seamless and even claim to improve content loading times because the site does not have to deal with ad latency.

As a result, up to now, AdBlocking has been regarded as a fringe issue confined to tech and gaming sites and has not ranked high on premium publishers “things to address” list. 

Two things have changed recently. Firstly some new VC backed, gaming sites have started to feel the financial pressure (reputedly between 30% and 40% of visitors are using Adblocking on these sites) and last week Apple announced that they were including content blocking in the Safari browser as part of iOS 9, which would make it fairly simple for iOS developers to create content blockers and for iOS customers to use them.

It is interesting to guess at Apple’s motivation for including an Adblocker. Whilst they have included an ad supported news service in an iOS 9 news app, this will not be affected by the content blocking extensions as they only apply to Safari. The content blockers however, have a much higher likelihood of affecting Google, who rely entirely on ad revenue supported model.

 Ad Blockers business model.

Investors, sensing a business opportunity, have introduced a business model into some AdBlockers.

The most controversial, introduced by Adblock Plus, offers to help publishers recapture ad impressions lost to its product by signing on to its Acceptable Ads program. To qualify, a publisher's ads must meet Adblock Plus' conditions for non-intrusiveness and pass a review by the open-source community before being approved. Adblock Plus then adds the site to its whitelist. Ads on whitelisted sites pass through Adblock Plus's filters by default (although users can still change the settings to ignore the whitelist).

Here’s the rub. Adblock Plus charges large publishers an undisclosed fee to restore their blocked ads.Not all Blocking sites operate this way “Adblock” for instance, has no investors and accepts donations as its business model.

You can forgive publishers for feeling victimized but consumers don't seem to care. Interestingly, publishers in the tech space who have offered their audiences the option of paying a low monthly fee to avoid seeing ads have found little traction.When Geekzone made this offer to it’s readers only 1000 of its 350 000 readers were willing to pay $2 a month for an ad-free option – source Computerworld.

 How does this effect advertisers?

If advertisers pay only for viewable ads or buy media on a cost per action (cpa) basis this won't affect them in the short term other than creating constrained supply

But if Adblocking becomes a profitable business it has every opportunity of undermining the current ad supported content model on the web. So far, Adblocking has only affected sites with tech savvy users, but if this practice is promoted more widely it could become a much more pervasive problem for premium publishers – and for Marketers who will inevitably have to pay more for truly native ad formats and customized ad units that will either go undetected by Adblockers or be allowed to pass through their filters.

 What to do?

Randall Rothenberg President of the IAB says his team is researching the technical and legal precedents very carefully, as concern amongst his members has ratcheted up considerably.

TechCrunch estimates that the number of consumers using Adblockers has increased from 40 million to over 200 million within the last 3 years (globally)– so this is now becoming an issue that warrants attention.

Legal recourse is possible, although Adblock Plus won a resounding victory in Germany last week against local broadcasters ensuring its right to continue operation.

Part of the solution could surely be to improve the quality of advertising experience on the web through more refined targeting, better quality creative, native formats and sensible frequency capping. If you don’t like dancing mortgage monkeys the first time you see them, you are unlikely to warm to them after a hundred OTS’.

Although we are getting better all the time, it’s probably not quickly enough for impatient consumers.

Technically, it seems feasible to detect if an Adblocker is operating on one’s site. If that is possible, one could give consumers an option: access the content in exchange for seeing ads, pay a subscription or be denied the service.  Perhaps this is more likely short-term solution; give consumers what they pay for or give them nothing.

There is no free lunch.

This note was written by John Montgomery of GroupM @taxidodger

Rob Norman, Chief Digital Officer GroupM @robnorman