Remember the age old days when we were bombarded with promotional mails? Email marketing still continues to be the cheapest form of direct marketing. It was short-lived till the term spam was coined and all the email service providers started incorporating algorithms to identify spam mails. With the onset of social media and ecommerce, Gmail has gone one step further to classify the mails under various headers in your inbox.

The online advertisement industry is pretty much in the same nascent phase as email was a few decades ago. There are some web sites that frustrate you by bombarding random ads and annoying pop ups. That is just with computer browsers, on a phone it feels like reading a book covered with newspaper ads. Internet users are now adopting the Usage of AdBlockers to elevate their browsing experience.

Types of Digital Advertisements

Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook are some of the big players in the online advertisement space. Google is the largest advertising company and supports many types of ads like web banners, interstitials, Search Engine Marketing etc . There is a myth that an average urban consumer is bombarded with 5000 ads per day and more than half of that is digital.

Retargetting through dynamic ads is the latest trend. Ecommerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart collect your browsing history and use the data to create dynamic ads for your social media feeds. This data is then sent to Google and Facebook along with your details to create and publish ads. and thus the ecommerce ads follow you everywhere. Hence ecommerce ads appear everywhere and helps them contact you across devices to increase the probability of a sale.

Rising use of AdBlockers

“Media adblock usage is surging internationally and has overtaken desktop usage”

Ads that disrupt the consumer experience by interrupting the content, slow browsing and disrupting the experience.

Security concern is another major motivation for adblocker usage. Fair Page research has reports that there has been a 30% global growth in usage last year. However the total usage of ad blockers is at just 11%. 615 Million devices are blocking ads as of December 2016. Adblock usage on desktops grew by 34 Million in 2016 despite the decline in overall desktop usage in 2016.  The strong customer value proposition “Enhance browsing experience” powers the proliferation of adblock usage.

Online ads are actually plugins embedded into the webpage’s html code. Appropriate ads are sourced from the ad server based on the available user details.  The adblockers access the html code through the browser  and detect the presence of ads.

Adblock and AdBlocker Plus (ABP) are monopolizing the adblock market with Ublock having a very small share.They are available as browser addons and can be installed in chrome and Safari. Similar apps are available on the mobile platform as well. The educated urban youth are the early adopters and maximum awareness has spread through Word of Mouth and media attention.

Disconnect is another browser app that exposes the various services that are present in the website. It also reveals their purpose of analyzing and collecting website usage information about what products you have clicked on, so that they can better trick you into buying something later. The seemingly beneficial targeted ads fool you into buying their products later.

Publisher Countermeasures and Justifications

Facebook and twitter have changed their page structure by adapting tamper proof technology, making it impossible for adblockers to detect ads. Currently adblockers cannot block all format of ads.The social media sites have also started created another new medium of internal advertisement called Paid Promotions. It appears as sponsored content in our feeds and is difficult to identify and block.

Some websites have taken the extreme step of using adblock walls. They aim to detect the presence of ad blockers and inform the viewers to disable the adblocker inorder to view the content. Popular sites like Forbes have adopted this . But they are ineffective as 70% of the users bounce off the site when they encountered this adblock wall.

The underlying motive of placing ads by the publisher is to monetize the content. So some sites and mobile applications now have a free version which comes with ads and another paid premium version where there are no ads and also offers better readibility.

Never too late:

This has also created a lightbulb moment among the users that they cannot access free content without seeing the advertisements that fund it. Publishers have now started listening to these legitimate grievances and started rethinking about the usage and placement of ads.

Ahead of the curve:

Adblock usage may accelerate unexpectedly if manufactures or distributors close deals to pre configure adblock software. There is also an increasing threat of browsers featuring inbuilt adblockers.

Websites like Facebook and Twitter are tweaking their code to improve the technology for displaying ads. As an enhancement, they are also providing more control to the users to choose their interests and type of ads. Even Google’s business took a hit when ads were displayed beside offensive content. Google keeps continuously altering its algorithms and checking their effectiveness. It employs Raters; who are carefully trained and tested staff who contribute significantly by reviewing the algorithms.

AdBlocker by Google – Acceptable Ads Program

Google, the largest advertisement company recently shocked the world by saying that they would build an adblocker for chrome. Though this might sound like a conflict of interest, Google is actually targeting “unacceptable ads” as proposed by the Coalition for Better Ads. Leading international trade associations and companies like Google and Facebook are amongst its members. The Coalition has defined “least preferred ad experience” in its website. Pop-ups, autoplaying video ads with sound, interstitial ads and large sticky ads are termed below the threshold of customer acceptability.

The Coalition for Better Ads will leverage consumer insights and cross-industry expertise to develop and implement new global standards for online advertising that address consumer expectations and promote Value Exchange.

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