David Crookes looks at how some companies are refusing to give away their content to those intent on blocking adverts
Each year there are certain signs that Christmas is on its way. There are the decorations in the shops that begin around October, the lights in the otherwise dark wintry streets and the festive, well-loved classic tunes mixed among the fair few that you wish would hibernate forever more. There are the jumpers emblazoned with woollen carrot-nosed snowmen, and red-faced boozers propping up bars with glasses of mulled wine, slapping their hands down amid the empty pint glasses as they tell everyone who passes that they really, really love them. But that’s the Christmas spirit, isn’t it? And most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.
In recent years, though, another tradition has emerged: the coming of the annual, mawkish advert created by everyone’s favourite department store, John Lewis. Seemingly aimed at boosting the sales of Kleenex rather than telescopes or presents for bears (“I have just started crying at the John Lewis advert. At 4pm in the afternoon with no alcohol inside me,” said one Twitter user), its ads have become so integral to the run-up to Christmas, social media and newspapers have even begun to trail them. Indeed, they’re perfect for sharing: a minute or so long, laden with a message and set to some pleasant, soothing music. Why, you would even think that we’re actually starting to like adverts.
Yet this is where the needle flies off the record and where the telescope used by the old man on the moon turns out to be a joke that puts a black rim around his eye. For the evidence points well and truly against that sentiment. The truth is we don’t like adverts at all. We hate them. And we do all we can the rest of the year to avoid and not embrace them.
What other conclusion could there be given the rising use of ad blocking software online and our desperate attempts to banish adverts from our day-to-day web surfing? There’s no getting away from the fact that the ad blocking market is a booming industry as more and more software is launched in the hope of keeping us safe from the capitalist ills of the world.
It has led to a huge game of tug-of-war as those who need adverts to survive try new tactics to head off the numerous steps being taken by firms to satiate demand from people who don’t want to see them. The efforts have intensified this year, and the latest salvo has been fired by Yahoo, which is adamant that it wants people to carry on watching, seeing and interacting with online adverts.
This became evident when American users tried to access their Yahoo email through a browser. They were told that they would have to switch off their ad blocker extensions, most notably Adblock Plus, before they could continue with the Mail service on Google Chrome or Firefox. At first, people thought it was surely some mistake.
“Uh oh! We are unable to display Yahoo Mail. Please disable ad blocker to continue using Yahoo Mail,” the message said, arousing suspicion. But no, Yahoo confirmed it had put a block on the ad blocker in the USA – and it may seek to do the same elsewhere.
As expected, this move has annoyed many users, and a few visited the Adblock Plus forums to vent their frustration. It led to some headlines in the mainstream media, including the BBC, but Yahoo says it’s a necessary step, and it’s one that we may even see replicated more and more. As the Cult of Mac website writes, content blockers “threaten the wallets of every ad-supported website”, and there are many online services across the world becoming very worried that ad blockers are destroying their revenues and viability.
The Fightback
Ad blockers have been around for quite some time (Adblock Plus, for instance, dates back to 2006), but their use has been controversial for pretty much the same period. In 2007, a web developer called Danny Carlton said the use of ad blockers was tantamount to theft, because blocking adverts rips away a vital revenue stream. Such a sentiment is often repeated.
The argument is that services are only provided for free because they can sell adverts on the back of them. As AdLover wrote on the Adblock Plus [ABP] forums following the decision by Yahoo: “It’s funny seeing all these ABP users squirm when a large entity takes the fight to them. You guys realise like, you get to search on Yahoo and use their email service FREE of charge, right? That’s kind of the point of the advertisements. Yahoo spends $$$ on hosting, design, programmers, etc. They don’t make you spend a penny. So there are advertisements.”
But why is Yahoo only taking action now; why hasn’t it done this kind of thing before? Well, a report by PageFair has shown there to be a stark rise in the number of people using ad blocking software. It found that blocking adverts online is costing publishers some $22 billion globally every year, and it says the number of people using ad blocker now stands at a staggering 41% worldwide. That puts the present figure of users at 198 million, which is worrying for the scores of businesses and websites that rely on advertising revenue.
What’s more, no country’s online business is immune. Even here in the UK, the issue is just as acute. Figures show that ad blocking in Britain has risen by 82%, and there are now 12 million active users of such software. Just like elsewhere, people are tiring of seeing adverts and fed up of hearing that they can be tracked. So when word spreads on social media and as people become more tech savvy, they turn to ad blockers as a solution. And perhaps the reason they’re doing so in even greater numbers than ever before is because we’re seeing record highs in the level of ads that are being promoted.
Go back to 2010, for instance, and just 21 million people used blocking software on their desktop. But there were fewer adverts back then, so it was much less of an in-your-face problem for users. Times have changed, though. Digital display advertising has been growing fast, and the amount of money spent on online ads is now worth £4 billion annually. Mobile spend has risen by 51% over the past year, and the trend looks set to continue, with the Internet Advertising Bureau UK (IAB UK) Digital Adspend report – conducted by PwC – saying “mobile is unquestionably the engine of digital growth”. “Recently a lot of the attention on digital advertising has been around the challenges, such as ad blocking,” admits Tim Elkington, chief strategy officer for IAB UK. And yet at no point does anyone think to temper things down a little.
An Apple A Day
And so we come to the next development: Apple’s decision to support content blocking extensions in the mobile web browser Safari. For the first time, people running iOS 9 can install third-party software that can block adverts, scripts, videos, cookies, pop-ups and more. The fight against ad blocking software by a good many websites has arguably intensified because of this.
It has certainly led to an eruption in the number of ad blockers ranging from 1Blocker to Silentium. Apple doesn’t make any such software itself, and none of those extensions available are allowed to affect Apple’s own in-app ads. But for those tiring of the rising number of adverts, the add-on software for Safari makes it easy to block ads: it’s usually a case of toggling a button by swiping it. Once done, adverts and a website’s lifeblood are speedily drained away from view.
But who does this appeal to? According to reports, young, tech savvy male surfers who enjoy gaming websites are the most likely demographic to block adverts. And if they continue to do so, then it is likely that many other firms will follow Yahoo’s lead and prevent people from accessing services unless they lift their ad blocks and allow the website they’re visiting to make some money.
Some are already doing all they can to discourage ad blocking use, and there have been cases of companies taking ad blockers to court. The German media giant Axel Springer, which owns newspapers such as Bild and Die Welt, is a case in point, with one of its subsidiaries, WELTN24, taking action against Blockr. A final ruling over whether or not the software is legal or not will be made on 10th December. Previous cases – including involving Eyeo, which makes Adblock Plus – have ruled in favour of the developer, but Axel Springer appears determined to win its fight.
Already it forces those who visit Bild to pay a monthly fee if they insist on using an ad blocker to access content on the site, leading to vast numbers turning it off when visiting. Others may well follow suit: the New York Times is saying that it is “exploring a number of options”, with chief executive Mark Thompson adding, “The creation of quality news content is expensive, and digital advertising is an important way in which we and other high-quality news providers fund operations.”
New Fronts
The war against ad blocking software is not entirely head-on, though. There are firms that take a more creative approach or try to hammer home the point that, without adverts, services have to be paid for somehow. Google has launched an ad-free subscription service called YouTube Red, which has original programming and a fee of $9.99-a-month for Android users ($12.99 for iOS). And there are companies that are looking to market their goods in a very different way: Criteo uses cookies to learn what you’re looking at online and then matches you to a database of emails. It will send an email promoting whatever item you may have been viewing. In this way, it doesn’t even matter if you’re not seeing adverts within websites.
There’s also a recognition of why people ad block, and it’s not entirely because they don’t want to see advertisements. People use the extensions to speed up internet access, save data and bandwidth and protect their privacy. This has led to firms adopting different tactics. The Washington Post and Slate are hoping to speed up access to their websites in the hope that those who block ads because they want a faster web will whitelist them in the future. They’re also doing all they can to avoid their adverts being infected by malware. It has been an issue in the past, and it makes users jittery. Only by tackling this problem will people feel confident enough to lift their ad blocking.
The gently-gently approach is actually a tactic in itself, with some companies refusing to engage in a fight with readers. “If our consumers are demanding ad block, then we have no choice than to allow that for now,” said Eyal Ebel, the head of programmatic at Gawker Media during the Digiday Programmatic Summit. “I don’t see a situation where Gawker Media says to readers, ‘You can’t read our content any more because you have an ad blocker.’”
Guilt Trips
But companies such as Gawker Media are relying on visitors displaying a sense of fairness. They know that the need to strike a balance between allowing people to control what they see online and letting free-service providers have some way of paying for it troubles scores of web users. Not everyone sees adverts as a nuisance, as we noted earlier, and there is an acceptance that without them, the web would not be the same as the one we currently enjoy.
This dilemma has even caused the developers of some ad blocking software to have a crisis of conscience. Marco Arment had a couple of sleepless nights over his iOS ad blocker app, Peace, and decided that he would pull it just two days after putting it on sale within the App Store.
Even though he called Peace’s success “the highlight of my professional career,” he wrote a blog post in which he added, “achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate but probably should have.” He offered those who bought the software a refund and said, “ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.”
In the event, Apple actually stepped in and said that it would automatically refund everyone who had bought Peace. This, Arment said, caused him to be happy – “or at least, as happy as someone can be who just made a lot of money on a roller coaster of surprise, guilt and stress, then lost it all suddenly in a giant, unexpected reset that actually resolves things pretty well.”
Even so, he still feels ad blockers are necessary. He suggests people try Purify, Ghostery or Crystal instead, but he remains concerned that ad blockers tend to treat all adverts in the same way (unless sites are whitelisted). The problem is that now ad blockers are so widely available and the demand is there, they’re not going to go away soon. The net is widening for ad blockers, and the indications are that they’re going to be more and not less widely used.
According to the Telegraph, EE is considering allowing its 27 million customers use of a technology that will allow them to block adverts not only on the mobile web but within apps too. It would, says Olaf Swantee, allow wide numbers of customers to control the volume of advertising and turn vast numbers on to the issue. It would be the first time that ad blocking would be performed at the network level.
“For EE, this is not about ad blocking, but about starting an important debate around customer choice, controls and the level of ads customers receive,” Swantee told the paper. He later added that he felt advertisers and publishers had a “dark underbelly” with fraud and over-intrusive tracking. “This could force it to face up to that.”
Making Tracks
Indeed, if websites become even more open about what they’re going to do with user data, and if they’re clear that visiting their website will not lead to privacy concerns, they may have a better chance of persuading people to turn their content blockers off. As it stands, tracking is one of the more controversial tools used by advertising networks. When you visit a wedding caterer’s website for instance, you may then be served up adverts about rings on other sites that you visit. In these cases, trackers are allowing advertising to be better targeted to suit your tastes, grabbing data in a split second and sharing it so that they can show you stuff that you’re statistically more likely to click.
The furore over such practices is why blockers like to promote their ability to prevent websites from being intrusive. Mozilla released a new version of Firefox in November including tracking protection for Windows, Mac, Android and Linux. It blocks ads, analytics trackers and social share buttons that can record user behaviour without knowledge across sites, and it will surely be welcomed by Do Not Track, a website run by Stanford and Princeton researchers Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan. If you ever want to see how you can prevent tracking on various websites, that is certainly a site to visit.
What this shows, though, is that users do have lots of control over what they see, and they can decide whether or not they want to be tracked and whether or not they want to view adverts. At the same time, the companies providing services also have a choice. They can, like Bild, charge people as compensation for the loss of advertising revenue or they can do what Yahoo is doing and simply prevent people from using a service.
Quite where all of this will go in the future is anyone’s guess, although we’re likely to see a greater number of sites following Yahoo’s lead. Yet we’re also going to see more people using ad blockers, although there is an alternatives. You can use anonymising web browsers like Tor, which do not block adverts if all you’re worried about is privacy. And you could also see adverts for what they are and decide that, if you want to enjoy the services you use, they’re a necessary evil. The problem comes with the tracking scripts embedded in adverts, so we may be at a stand-off for now. We’re certain a happy resolution will be reached eventually, but one side is going to have to blink first.
Acceptable Ads Manifesto
Adblock Plus is one of the most widely used ad blocking programs, and its maker has tried to be fair to websites that reply on adverts to generate revenue. It has signed up to the Acceptable Ads Manifesto, which has also been agreed to by the likes of Reddit, DuckDuckGo and PageFair.
The manifesto is straightforward enough, and it rallies against ad rollovers and those that blink for attention. It states that Acceptable Ads are not annoying, do not disrupt or distort the page content being read, are transparent about being an ad, effective without shouting and appropriate to the site that a user is on.
With acceptable ads allowed to filter through, users can support responsible websites. Companies have to apply to the developer of Adblock Plus, Eyeo, in order to get their site whitelisted. Once a form has been completed, a representative from Eyeo makes contact to determine the ad in question. The proposal is then listed in the Adblock Plus forum and debated. Once it has been accepted, the site is allowed through in a process that takes ten working days in total.
Some sites – including Google, Microsoft and Amazon – have paid Adblock Plus’ owner to be whitelisted, although 90% of entities in the programme make no payments. The Financial Times said the fee was “30% of the additional ad revenues” that would have been made if the ads were unblocked. It is still possible to opt out of the acceptable ads program by unchecking “Allow non-intrusive advertising”.
Try The Ethical Ad Blocker
If the idea of blocking adverts on websites causing internal unrest in your head, then you may want to check out the Ethical ad blocker by artist Darius Kazemi. It will prevent you from seeing any adverts on any page that you decide to visit online. The only problem is that if it detects there are adverts on a website, it won’t display the ad-supported site either.
Instead, it will show you a message that reads, “Sorry. This page is ad supported. It would be unethical to view this site. Try a website like textfiles.com, the Mozilla Developer Network or zombo.com instead. They give their stuff away for free.”
Kazemi writes, “The conundrum at hand: users don’t want to see ads, but content providers can’t give away content for free. The solution is simple: if a website has ads, the user simply should not be able to see it. This way, the user doesn’t experience ads, but they also don’t leech free content. Everybody wins!”