The Ad-Blocking Wars

Ad blocking is a symptom, not a cause. It reflects dissatisfaction with a range of perceived impositions, from government oversight to marketers abuse of personal data.

It won't be stoppable until the underlying inequities are addressed. Which means no time soon. JL

Kate Murphy reports in the New York Times:

Ad blocking is a symptom of a pervasive problem. If consumers enjoyed the web experience and felt there were adequate controls for privacy and the ad industry was making a sincere effort to fight abuse and malfeasance, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

YOU might have noticed that even when using a lightning-fast Internet connection, it takes a few beats, enough time to drum your fingers, for web pages to load. It’s likely because of online advertising, which bogs down your browser, drains your battery and jacks up mobile charges — not to mention collects private data.

So it’s little wonder that the use of ad-blocking software grew 41 percent last year, with 198 million active users worldwide, according to a study conducted by Adobe and PageFair. This represents an existential threat to the $50 billion online advertising industry and has ignited a bitter feud between advertisers and developers of ad-blocking apps. On the sidelines, privacy advocates are pumping their fists for consumer choice while web publishers wring their hands over lost revenue.

The fight became public last month when Randall Rothenberg, the president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, lobbed several verbal grenades at developers of ad blockers during his keynote address to his group’s annual leadership meeting. He called them “an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes.” His venom was directed particularly at for-profit ad blockers who, for a fee, will unblock advertisers who meet certain standards of nonintrusiveness. Rothenberg called the practice “extortion.”

Ad blockers fired right back. “We are as motivated to protect consumers as advertisers are to abuse them,” said Roi Carthy, the chief marketing officer for Shine, an Israeli company that recently began offering ad-blocking software to wireless carriers, which are increasingly weary of the burden data-intensive ads place on their networks. Heretofore, ad blockers were mainly sold or given away to individuals. “This is a holy war for us,” Mr. Carthy said.

Shine is partly financed by the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing who also has stakes in Facebook, Spotify and the Bitcoin payment company BitPay. Shine’s first major client is the Caribbean mobile service Digicel, and Mr. Carthy claims his team is negotiating with 60 other carriers.

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“I feel like I’m caught between two parents fighting,” said Niero Gonzalez, founder of Destructoid, a website for gamers. “There is a valid security and privacy reason to run ad-blocking software, obviously, but then you have the brands who want their ads to pop up and autoplay and take over. This is killing the free web.”

His primary audience, tech-savvy gamers, were early adopters of ad-blocking software because they realized, more than most, the commotion going on behind the scenes the moment you direct your browser to a website. As many as 100 companies might be alerted, thus setting off a digital scrum as marketing and tracking entities elbow one another to figure out, based on your past online activity, whether you’d be more likely to click on an ad to say, lose weight, refinance your mortgage or improve your sexual potency.

The goal is to make an “impression” (industry lingo for when an ad appears on the page you’re viewing), and publishers get paid when they allow advertisers the privilege. Advertisers get paid by brands and trackers get paid by, well, everybody. All this is automated and happens in seconds, sometimes milliseconds.

Within the last six months or so, ad blocking has left the geek realm and gone mainstream. Howard Stern raved about ad blockers on his radio show, and ad blocking was the theme of a recent episode of “South Park.”

Moreover, when Apple made ad blockers available in its App Store last fall, they quickly became among the most downloaded apps. And later this year, Microsoft is reportedly going to allow an extension to its Edge browser that supports the most popular blocker, Adblock Plus. Read what you will into the fact that Apple and Microsoft’s business models aren’t overly reliant on advertising, unlike their rivals Google and Facebook.

But focusing on ad-blocking software misses the real point, said Jason Kint, the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents digital content companies like ESPN, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, BBC and The New

York Times.

“By installing ad blockers, consumers are telling us very clearly they don’t want to be tracked across the web,” he said. “That’s going to be uncomfortable for a lot of advertising technology companies out there who have been enjoying what has been the Wild West.”

The advertising industry’s solution thus far has been AdChoices, a program that allows consumers to opt out of some targeted ads. But critics dismiss it as window dressing because it’s confusingly presented, cumbersome to enable and not comprehensive, and does not stop tracking.

While The New York Times is still weighing its options, other web publishers have responded to ad blockers using a variety of tactics. Some, like Forbes, have fought back with technology that blocks the ad blockers. But judging from the experience of the technology news website Ars Technica, blocking the blockers is a futile exercise.

BACK in 2010, Ars Technica tried it, and within 12 hours a coder had uploaded a workaround to Adblock Plus. Following that, the site’s founder and editor in chief, Ken Fisher, wrote an article titled “Why Ad Blocking Is Devastating to the Sites You Love.”

“That article lowered the ad-block rate by 12 percent, and what we found was that the majority of people blocking ads on our site were doing it because other sites were irritating them,” Mr. Fisher said. “It’s the worst players in the web publishing world that’s driving this.”

But he said the number of ad blockers is creeping back up, so Ars Technica plans to start a program similar to ones that have been used on a trial basis on other sites like Wired, The Washington Post, Slate and The Atlantic. The goal is to detect people who are blocking and inform them of ways to support the site. They can selectively unblock the site, subscribe, buy temporary access or just keep reading knowing it’s depriving the site of needed revenue. A possible gauge of the effectiveness of guilt is listener-supported NPR, which has a 36 percent donation rate.

“The temptation is to block these people who honestly aren’t going to respond to ads anyway,” Mr. Fisher said. “I think what everybody should focus on is the educational aspect and give people the option to pay for an ad-free experience.”

Google recently began offering that option with its Contributor program. And Sprint’s Boost Mobile is testing a program where it actually pays users to look at ads.

But it may be instructive to look at what happened back in the 1990s when spam was the scourge of consumers. The fix came only when entities like Spamhaus started compiling lists of bad actors, based in part on what consumers marked as spam. Email providers then subscribed to those lists so they could block offenders.

Craig Spiezle, executive director of the Online Trust Alliance, a consumer advocacy group, said something similar could happen with online advertising, where stakeholders agree to observe best practices, including respecting Do Not Track, or D.N.T., which is a preference consumers can activate in their browsers. Right now, D.N.T. is largely ignored by advertisers and websites. Obscuring ads and autoplay audio and video would also likely be prohibited.

“Those who don’t follow the rules will be blacklisted like spammers,” said Mr. Spiezle, who formerly oversaw security of Microsoft’s Hotmail.

The Federal Trade Commission has yet to intervene on this issue. And it’s unlikely that Congress will act given how heavily politicians rely on tracking and other online advertising technology to court voters.

The Online Trust Alliance conducted an audit of the presidential candidates, and the vast majority received failing grades in terms of tracking and protecting the privacy of the people who visited their websites.

“Ad blocking is a symptom of a pervasive problem,” Mr. Spiezle said. “If consumers enjoyed the web experience and felt there were adequate controls for privacy and the ad industry was making a sincere effort to fight abuse and malfeasance, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”