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Who's To Blame For The Rise In Ad Blocking?
- Advertising Age, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:41 AM
During Ad Age's Digital Conference, participants on the ad-blocking panel agreed on one thing: It's an issue in the short term, and better content might be one way to combat it. But give it five years and there may not even be an issue at all. "Ad blocking will still exist, but I think it's a fad," said Shenan Reed, president of digital for WPP's MEC in North America. "It's going to start to wane a bit and we'll get over the newness syndrome."
During the panel, Reed accepted some of the blame on behalf of advertisers. "Pages have way too many ad units," she said. "[W]e created an interruption experience as opposed to an engagement experience. We need to resell advertising back to the customer to make them feel like we're doing them a service." Jen Soch, VP-commercial delivery from The Guardian agreed: "We did this to ourselves," she said, sharing some of the blame on behalf of publishers. "We took ads that were inappropriate for publishers and that consumers don't like."
As a publisher who has been online 13 years now, published over 55,000 native marketing, I can say I know the subject well. I have taken the attitude from the beginning to run a 5-star website including the quality of the banners we put up. I hate junk and scam ads. I have blocked tens of thousands of them over the years. Yet, the ad distributors like Google AdSense, Yahoo and others force junk ads on us.
Advertising Age, this is first level of the problems. There are many more problems, issues, that we publishers deal with. We even see sophisticated datamining cheats. Now the cheats have expanded into social media big time. Advertising Age, you have struck you head in sand when on these issues.
Then the problem expanded when the ad distributors allowed the advertisers to block sites. While on the surface this is not a problem and I fully understand the advertisers point of view. The problem is that there were two big log jams in the system that developed. You had all of the quality ads going to a smaller number of websites and the lower quality ads included scam ads going to the remaining sites. Worse, yes there are bad apples in online sweepstakes publishing. The point here is www.sweepstakestoday.com was put into a very unfair category of website.
I have a very big list of thing that is wrong that are important but never discussed. Including Google calling to tell me to take down competitor’s banners. That’s against anti-trust laws. I refused Google’s demands. In all over 3 years, we lost well over $200,000. Google sent a very loud message. What made it worse a long time ago Google AdSense came to us and said if we redesigned ST with 3 banners above the fold, then they would pay us double. We did and they put us on the higher revenue level.
Give the small to mid-size and even a large publisher like we are a voice about the problems instead of shutting us out and then saying we are part of the problem.
Care to man up now?