Online advertisements are very irritating – But they finance a large part of the internet. The war that has now broken out over them could change the web for ever
Online advertising is the economic engine of the internet, but a curse for many users: Without advertising, there would be no free products or free news reports. Facebook, Twitter and Google services (including Gmail and YouTube) would have been out of the picture, too. On the other hand, online advertising has enormous disadvantages: It slows down websites, because several advertising servers are addressed and loaded in the background when the website is called up. It causes additional traffic, which often eats up the bandwidth, with mobile devices being hit hard in particular. Online advertising also represents a security risk: At the beginning of November 2015, unknown persons hijacked the advertising network of the company PageFair, and infected up to 3,000 websites with drive-by-downloads containing Windows malware.
As if that wasn’t enough, the flashy banners, automatic audio and video advertisements and advertising overlays that appear on sites are so intrusive that users often have a hard time finding the actual contents. Thanks to this, users throughout the world are increasingly relying on advertising blockers, or adblockers. And their numbers are rising very rapidly: According to a study conducted by Adobe and the anti-Adblock company PageFair, about 198 million surfers throughout the world were using advertising blockers in June 2015 – That represents an increase of more than 40 percent within a year.
At the global level, the advertising revenue that has been blocked by advertising blockers is estimated to be as high as about 22 billion US dollars – And that’s just for the first half of 2015. This is a magnitude that puts commercial publishing-related offers under a particularly large amount of pressure. The situation is made even worse by the fact that browsers such as Firefox firmly integrate adblocking tools.
War over ad-blockers
In Germany, a veritable war has flared up over advertising blockers. The primary front involves a battle between the Springer publishing house and Eyeo GmbH, which makes the popular Adblock Plus addon. After repeatedly making unsuccessful attempts to get the software banned by a court, Springer unceremoniously sealed off its website from users who were using an ad blocker – This happened in the middle of October 2015. A YouTube user who posted a video explaining how to circumvent the blockage received a warning from Springer’s lawyers. Filter lists that made it possible for users to circumvent the blockage popped up in the corporate blog of Eyeo GmbH, and the company received a judicial decree. Regardless of whether Springer continues to proceed against all those who wish to ‘improperly circumvent’ the blockage, or whether it’s just a case of empty sabre-rattling, one thing is crystal clear.
Most ad blocker users will not be dissuaded from using such tools. The wide range of tools that is available covers everything from classical ad blockers to tracking blockers and script blockers.
The advertising blocker as an advertising marketer
The group of classic advertising blockers includes the tool that has been targeted by Springer, i.e. Adblock Plus (ABP). The principle behind ABP is quite simple: The add-on prevents the browser in which it has been installed from loading content associated with known web servers. This way, it makes use of filter lists containing the names of these servers. The most famous of these lists is the EasyList, which is activated automatically during installation. The filter settings can be used to subscribe to additional lists or create separate filters.
This may surprise several users of ABP: The operator of ABP is an advertising marketer. Advertisements that are considered to be unobtrusive by Eyeo GmbH are collected in a white list and passed through in spite of the activated blocker. Publishing houses and advertising networks that want to be included in the white list don’t just have to fulfil the criteria associated with the ‘Acceptable Ads’ campaign; they also have to pay for inclusion. Those who do not want to see any advertisements at all can either use the filter settings to deactivate the option for displaying unobtrusive advertisements, or use uBlock Origin, which is an alternative to ABP. For the most part, this ad blocker uses the same filter lists as ABP, but it does not offer the paid white-listing facility.
No snooping, no advertisements
The second category includes tracking blockers such as Ghostery, Privacy Badger and eBlocker. The primary goal of these tools is not to block advertisements; rather, to block snooping tools such as cookies and social media buttons. However, online advertisers use these very things to record the users’ surfing behaviour, in order to be able to display personalised advertisements across a variety of sites. Consequently, the blocking of tracking mechanisms frequently leads to a situation in which advertisements are also blocked. However, Ghostery and ABP share a similar disadvantage: When the tool is being set up, a window with the title ‘‘Help Ghostery remain free” pops up. If you click the ‘‘Yes! I want to participate” button, Ghostery will collect the detected cookie data.
This data is then sold to advertising firms in an anonymised form, so that the advertising firms can optimise their advertising efforts. Even in this case, you can either deactivate the collection option or use an alternative tool such as Privacy Badger. This add-on functions like Ghostery, but it was developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is an American non-government organisation that fights for basic digital rights.
Unlike classical advertising and tracking blockers, script blockers such as NoScript suppress insecure web technologies such as Flash or Java, in order to protect the user from malicious drive-bydownloads. Some advertisements such as blinking Flash banners are also removed this way. The disadvantage: Media such as videos also disappear. With this in mind, script blockers require a certain amount of fine-tuning.
Advertising blockers are changing the web
The fact that there are legitimate reasons for blocking advertisements has also been recognised by the advertising industry itself: ‘‘We botched it up”, wrote Scott Cunningham in a blog entry about the current condition of online advertising. In his capacity as the technology chief of the international online advertising association IAB, he is consequently calling for a programme that is supposed to make online advertisements more secure, more unobtrusive, less data-intensive and more adjustable. The goal is to use better advertisements to lower the quote of ad blockers.
While the IAB is still thinking about binding guidelines, publishing companies are already responding to ad blockers with very concrete measures.
In addition to the publishing houses, advertising marketers such as Google and Facebook are also tackling the problems associated with online advertisements. Advertisements that are displayed through the Google advertising network can be made to disappear via a little cross in the advertisement. This is supposed to prevent the user from feeling like he is at the mercy of the advertisement, while simultaneously making the advertisement more relevant. With the so-called ‘Instant Articles’, Facebook aims to solve the problem of long loading times and additional traffic, which can be particularly frustrating if the scenario involves a smartphone. Instant Articles are articles that appear directly in the Facebook app, instead of appearing on the sites of the publishing houses. Under this scenario, the advertisements don’t just get loaded quicker; they cannot be blocked, either. Apple (the manufacturer of the iPhone) offers a similar programme called ‘Apple News’, but this programme is currently only available in the USA.