The future of the web is at stake—who will come to its rescue?
For years, digital publishers have relied ononline advertising to sustain their existence. Save for sites that sit behind a paywall and charge subscription fees, ads are the reason why the vast majority of content on the web is free. It’s a business model that’s worked to this point, but with the recent rise in the use of ad-blockers, publishers and readers are suddenly at odds with one another.
Part of the problem is that many site owners treat ad-blockers as a taboo subject, as though acknowledging their existence will make things worse. Others bring attention to the issue, but in negative ways, by drawing battle lines in the sand. For example, Yahoo recently made headlines for running an ad-blocking test that prevented users of its Yahoo Mail service from accessing their email until they disabled their ad-blockers.
We reached out to Eyeo, the maker of Adblock Plus, a popular, free ad-blocking extension for browsers, for thoughts on the subject. Ben Williams, communications manager for Eyeo, declined to address Yahoo’s actions, but did offer some interesting thoughts on ad-blocking. “I would say that ad-blocking developed as a response to bad ads. However, blocking all ads is not the right approach,” Williams told us. “Because of that, we developed Acceptable Ads—a certification process for better ads, which allows ads that met user-generated criteria to be whitelisted…. While we as an ad-blocker cannot solve the entire online monetization conundrum, Acceptable Ads has sparked a larger discussion that seems to be spurring on change in the industry.”
Honest discussion is needed, as the online monetization conundrum is no small thing. The use of ad-blocking software is up almost 50 percent from last year, according to a PageRank report commissioned by Adobe. PageRank predicts that ad-blockers will deprive online publishers of over $20 billion in 2016, and that’s just in the United States.
With so much money at stake, it’s no surprise that some online publishers equate the use of ad-blockers to stealing. They argue that readers are breaking an unwritten contract, but there are valid reasons why ad-blockers exist. One of them is for security.
“While advertising is an effective way to generate revenue for websites, we have seen malware-infected ads (malvertising) as far back as 2007,” Bruce Snell, cybersecurity and privacy director at Intel Security. “From a security perspective, ad-blocking software is a very good way to prevent malvertising from infecting your system with drive-by downloads or opening up countless pop-up ads. Dangerous ads aren’t just a problem for PCs, as we see similar problems for Android.”
It sounds like a lose-lose situation, although Snell argues that ad-blocking software would be less of a necessity if individual sites stopped using automated ad networks, or if ad providers started doing a better job of screening their content for malware.
At present, the only real compromise that exists is for ad-blocking users to willingly accept ads for sites they support. That’s fine for now, but a sustainable solution will only be found via an open and honest dialogue by both sides.