• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, October 1, 2015

Silicon Alley tech startup NadaWait.com used New York's schizophrenic Advertising Week to announce that it has launched a browser-based program that blocks all online content except ads. When users navigate to any page on the Web, all that loads are ads such as banners, leader boards, microbars, skyscrapers, popups, pop-unders, interstitials, overlays, takeovers, and video ads — including IAB-approved billboards,  filmstrips, portraits pushdowns, progressive loads, sidekicks, time syncs, extenders and sliders.

"Eliminating content greatly speeds up the page load time, thus providing the consumer with an improved online experience," says NadaWait.com CEO Edward Lillywhite. "Moreover, there is bound to be at least one ad that is relevant to the user, so in many respects we are serving the right ad, at the right time, to the right person."

During its beta period, NadaWait.com tested the impact of content loading on 50 Web sites and found that occasionally some content would take longer to load than the ads (especially when viewed on mobile devices). "Consumers don't have a lot of patience, and they will click away if pages don't load in a timely fashion," said Mr. Lillywhite in a press release. "By eliminating content, especially video that can take FOREVER to load, we are providing an invaluable service to the advertising community, which provides the revenue to keep most sites up and running."

In an email exchange, Mr. Lillywhite revealed that he was quick to spot that the market was overloaded with programs that blocked ads — but that there was nothing out there to block content. "If you read between the lines of all the debates about ad blocking, you occasionally hear a distant voice claiming that consumers LIKE ads. That really resonated with me. I still ask my kids 'Whassup?' when I see them -- and when my wife fixes a meal that is mostly vegetarian, I like to kid her by asking 'Where's the beef?' What more proof do you need?"

"Given the variety and creativity of online advertising, consumers will probably kill as much time on Web sites now as they do on YouTube watching kindergarten classes singing Justin Bieber or teenage boys failing to land stupid bike/car/skateboard/trampoline/pool tricks."

"This could be a game-changer,” said Lightning Jefferson, an analyst with Gosden and Correll. "Advertisers should see time of engagement shoot through the roof when consumers have little else to look at but their ads. Content created a fair amount of clutter, but now eyes will be drawn to the revenue-producing parts of websites, a big win for marketers and publishers."

"We are very excited by Nada," says one newspaper executive, who asked not to be named since he is not authorized to talk to the press, a humorous juxtaposition given his industry. "We have already begun to job-eliminate nearly the entire newsroom, which has cut our overhead substantially. Not only that, we get to tell the Guild to f*** off!"

Several publishers contacted said Nada.com would easily reverse the growing trend to minimize or eliminate tech middlemen, and would simplify the selling process by eliminating the need to try and convince buyers that some parts of their sites were premium.

"We can just give it all to the programmatic guys and sit back and count the money," said one publisher, who was standing on the street in an Ad Week downpour waiting pointlessly for a cab. "It is about time somebody did something nice for the online ad business."