No one likes adverts. But how else can websites make money? Sarah Dobbs investigates
When you’re reading a magazine, how much time do you spend looking at the adverts? Might be a risky question to ask in a paper magazine, but chances are you generally flip past them, unless maybe you’re in the market for a new graphics card or something catches your eye. Most people don’t exactly like seeing ads in the middle of their mag, but they’re just there, aren’t they? They’re a part of the publishing landscape, a way for magazines to finance their existence, so you look at them, or you turn the page, and that’s it.
Online, things are a bit different. Advertising is just as important to publishers (more so, even, because readers aren’t paying anything to access online content), but people are less willing to tolerate them. Last summer, online publishers got a terrifying wakeup call when Apple enabled ad blocking in iOS 9. Suddenly, the top app in the App Store was an ad blocker. Google has banned ad blockers from its Play store, but while that means Android users might not be able to block adverts on their mobile devices, their desktops are another story: AdBlock is the most popular Chrome extension, with an estimated 40 million users. It seems pretty clear that if people are offered the opportunity to block adverts online, they’re going to.
But should we be feeling guilty about that? After all, our favourite websites rely on ad impressions to pay their writers, keep their sites running smoothly and to pay their server bills. If you block adverts on a website, does that mean you’re essentially stealing their content? Even if you don’t feel particularly bothered by that, could blocking all adverts eventually mean sites you really like end up being shut down? Surely there must be a way to avoid getting pestered by auto-playing video ads and pop-ups without contributing to the downfall of websites we’d actually like to keep reading?
Pay For It
The obvious answer is that you could just pay for the content you’re reading. Some websites insist on readers paying to access their content by implementing paywalls: the Times, for example, won’t let you read anything past the first paragraph or so of an article without subscribing. (It costs roughly £1 per week, depending on which package you choose.)
Most of the sites that use paywalls are publications that started out in print and then moved online, like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, which makes a sort of sense; their readers are presumably used to paying to read them. But paywalls aren’t always effective, and analysis of even big publications shows that their subscriber base isn’t growing very fast, and the revenue they receive through their paywall system is dwindling. The problem is, on the internet, you can almost always find the same information somewhere else, so if you click to read an article and find it’s locked up behind a paywall, you can probably just Google it and read someone else’s take on the same thing for free. Last year, the Sun decided to remove its paywall for that exact reason; readers were visiting rival sites, like MailOnline, that didn’t use paywalls, so in order to compete it had to give up on locking away its articles.
Some online publications have chosen to ask for donations instead. Wikipedia, of course, doesn’t display adverts but does run regular donation drives to ask for users’ support with its bills, and many blogs have prominently displayed PayPal ‘tip jars’ for readers to bung them some cash. Other sites get a bit more sophisticated. For example, if you visit Wired’s website with an ad blocker installed in your browser, you’ll see a message pop up to ask you to consider paying $1 a week to access a special ad-free version of the website. That seems pretty sensible, but there’s no way of knowing just yet how many people are willing to do that. Again, the problem with the internet is that people might click away rather than putting their hands in their pockets.
Whitelisting
What if you don’t want to have to pay to read something online, though? After all, each website might only be asking for a couple of quid at a time, but that can soon mount up if you read a lot of different sites. And donating occasionally, when you’re feeling flush, is fine, but websites can’t really rely on everyone remembering to occasionally bung them a bit of cash.
The other obvious alternative is to whitelist certain websites. That means your ad blocker will allow adverts on certain sites, but not everywhere, so you can decide you’re willing to put up with seeing advertising on your favourite blogs, but not everywhere all over the internet. If you’ve found yourself annoyed with certain kinds of advertising, certain ad placements or just the way some sites absolutely plaster their entire home page with ads, you can block the really annoying ones while letting through the more considerate ads – a compromise that comes with much less guilt.
The same pop-up overlay on the Wired website that asks visitors to consider paying a fee also offers whitelisting as an option. (It even includes a link to a handy site explaining exactly how to add sites to your whitelist in a range of popular ad blockers, which is nice.) Other sites have taken similar measures: Forbes asks readers politely to deactivate their ad blockers, while GQ’s site sometimes locks readers out unless they either cough up $0.50 or disable their ad blocking software on the website.
Still, these kinds of measures are currently in a minority, and it’s a lot easier to just install an ad blocker and forget all about it. But that’s not really a good option in the long run. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to come up with a way of funding websites without driving away readers or making them do things to circumvent the money-making bits.
Better Advertising
That solution, then, might be better advertising. If you install Ad Block now, you’ll find that the setting to allow ‘Acceptable Ads’ is automatically enabled. From 2011, Ad Block has been working on an initiative based on the idea that not all advertising is equally annoying, and that blocking all of it isn’t necessarily helpful. Instead, a list of criteria for Acceptable Ads was drawn up, and these kinds of adverts can be automatically allowed through Ad Block’s filters.
The criteria are pretty strict. To meet Ad Block’s standards, adverts should be placed on top of, beneath or to the side of website content, so they don’t get in the way of reading the actual stories; they should always be labelled as adverts and not masquerade as content; and they should fit within certain size guidelines so as not to overwhelm the actual content. (There are some other requirements, too, including a ban on excessive use of colour; you can read the whole thing here: adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads#criteria.)
The long game here is pretty obvious: if Acceptable Ads make money while other, less ‘acceptable’ forms of advertising are blocked out and don’t, then gradually more and more adverts will start to be designed more sympathetically, meaning users don’t get annoyed, and publishers get to make money. Ad Block wants most of its users to allow Acceptable Ads, which is why the feature is enabled by default – though you can turn it off if you really don’t want to see any ads, ever.
But Ad Block’s research suggests most people are behind the idea. 75% of users surveyed said they were happy to accept some heavily vetted adverts in order to support businesses, which seems pretty encouraging.
No Answers
Ultimately, there isn’t an easy and obvious answer to this problem. Experts estimate that online publishers will miss out on a whopping $41 billion (about £29 billion) thanks to people using ad blockers this year, which is going to be hard to recoup through a few digital donation boxes. And here’s an added twist of the knife: according to a report published by the International News Media Association, the very people who are most likely to install ad blocking software are the exact demographic advertisers most want to reach, because they’re generally young and tech savvy.
That report, titled What To Do About Adblocking, did offer a ray of hope, though. It turns out when people who run ad blockers do see advertising, they’re more likely to interact with it (i.e. click on it and maybe buy something) than people who don’t. That should be an added incentive to websites to make sure their advertising fits the Acceptable Ads criteria, as soon as possible. There could be serious money in it.
For now, though, all I can really recommend is, if you’re going to run ad blockers, do take a minute to check whether you really need to block all ads, or if you can set up your software to allow through some ads without causing yourself too much annoyance. It’s the best idea anyone’s had so far for supporting sites you love without having to put your hand in your pocket.
Why Peace Got Pulled
On 16th September 2015, iOS 9 launched, and with it the ability to block ads in mobile browsers. One app that took advantage of that capability was Peace, an ad blocking app created by Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment. Within hours, Peace was the most downloaded paid app in the App Store. It cost $2.99 (£2.29) to download, which should say something about just how keen people were to block mobile ads.
Its success instantly made headlines, with some critics pointing out that it might not be entirely ethical for Arment to be making piles of cash off stopping other businesses from profiting from their work. As someone who had previously argued strenuously in favour of ad blocking (he even said people shouldn’t feel guilty, because online ads use people’s battery life, time and privacy without permission), Arment didn’t seem like someone who’d be too upset about that.
But then, on 18th September, he pulled the app from the App Store. In a blog post entitled “Just doesn’t feel good” (marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good), he explained that he didn’t feel comfortable with the success of Peace, because while it benefited some people, it unfairly punished others.
Peace didn’t have any way to distinguish between different kinds of ads, ‘acceptable’ or otherwise, so it just blocked everything. According to Arment, that made it too blunt a tool and one that didn’t support the kind of online environment he ultimately wanted to encourage.
So everyone who’d bought Peace got a refund, and Arment went back to working on other products, like his Overcast podcast app. Meanwhile, anyone still wanting to block apps on their iPhone or iPad could still choose from plenty of other ad blockers, so this is still going to be an issue that gets fought over for a long while yet.
Case Study: The Toast
How do you make money as an online publication? There are lots of examples of people trying and failing. The Toast (the-toast.net) might be one of very few examples of how to succeed.
Founders Mallory Ortberg, Nicole Cliffe, and Nick Pavich launched the site in July 2013, and right from the beginning they were determined to pay their writers and illustrators. Cliffe contributed the up-front cash to get the site going, but even so, within three months they were making a profit and have continued to do so since, to the point where they’ve managed to hire new staff, as well as continuing to pay their writers and illustrators.
How? Well, firstly, advertising, obviously. The site runs a limited amount of adverts, which are vetted for suitability to avoid annoying readers. It also runs a small amount of sponsored content, which is all labelled as such and tailored to fit in alongside its regular content.
But it’s got a few other ways of raising cash too. For starters, there’s merchandise: Toast branded T-shirts and tote bags featuring in-jokes and illustrations from the site’s regular artists. Then there are donations. Every article on the site has a donation link at the bottom, suggesting that readers might like to leave a ‘tip’ if they liked the article. The suggested amount is just $1, which doesn’t seem like much, and the process for paying it is pretty simple. You don’t even need to follow a link to another page: a PayPal form appears when you click the tip button.
For readers wanting to donate more, there’s a separate donation page, which lets people donate a sum of their choice, either as a one-off donation or as a regular thing. There’s even a sweetener for anyone who wants to donate $50 (about £36) or more: after paying up, readers can choose to sponsor a post. Depending on the amount, that might include paying for more ambitious work or even a whole series of articles.
This is a success story that comes with caveats, of course; the Toast’s founders won’t disclose exactly how much they make from the site, it only has a handful of staff to support and it has relatively few overheads, running mostly pop culture commentary and personal essays that don’t require travel budgets or any of the other costs newspapers like the Guardian would have to cough up for. Still, it’s a promising example.
The Problem With Advertorials
Here’s another problem that ad blockers contribute to: the rise of online advertorials or undisclosed ads. Imagine you’re a blogger who wants to turn your website into a business. If most of your readers run ad blocking software, you’re not going to be able to make much from ad revenue, which means you need to turn to other sources – things that ad blockers won’t remove. Things like sponsored content that’s paid for by businesses, but isn’t labelled as advertising, for example.
That kind of advertising is the most insidious of all, because it masquerades as someone’s real opinion – and sometimes, it is, or as close to a real opinion as anyone can have when they’ve been paid to try a product. But most readers hate it and, more importantly, it goes against the Advertising Standards Agency’s Advertising Code, which states that all ads should be obviously identifiable as ads.
Over the last couple of years, the ASA has started to crack down on undisclosed advertising, especially in relation to YouTube vloggers, who are now required to put a disclaimer in the title of any video that contains paid-for content. Technically, bloggers should do the same to avoid breaking the law. But it’s easy to see how that kind of advertising might slip through the net and how tempting it might be to accept money for promoting things if you can’t otherwise make money off writing a blog – even one with a massive readership.