Block and Blue
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The worlds of publishing, marketing and technology are frantically seeking solutions for the multi-billion-dollar revenue hemorrhage called ad-blocking. Bob Garfield explains the convergence of technology, impunity and plain inevitability that got us to where we are today.
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Block and Blue
- 2. Why?
- 3. Pick One, or Mix and Match • Because the tax receipts are necessary to keep the society afloat. • Because it is our civic duty in support of the commonweal. • Because in exchange we receive enormous value, including basic services, security, infrastructure, rule of law, social and economic opportunity, a social safety net to somewhat protect our most unfortunate fellow citizens from poverty, in turn somewhat protecting us from our most unfortunate fellow citizens. • To stay out of prison.
- 4. Why do Greeks, Russians, Serbs, Spaniards and Brazilians evade taxes on such a grand scale?
- 6. What if?
- 11. Acceptable Ads are not annoying. Acceptable Ads do not disrupt or distort the page content we're trying to read. Acceptable Ads are transparent with us about being an ad. Acceptable Ads are effective without shouting at us. Acceptable Ads are appropriate to the site that we are on.
- 12. Whose fault is it?
- 13. Advertisers?
- 14. Publishers?
- 15. Crooks?
- 17. Consumers?
- 18. Nobody
- 19. A Simple Fix from the Managing Director of the World Federation of Advertisers “The internet advertising experience is not satisfactory for consumers. As brand owners, we have to take a longer-term view and create an acceptable, sustainable advertising environment -- not push things to people in a way that turns them off.“ -- Stephan Loerke
- 20. “We have to alter time, space and the laws of economics,” “We have to neutralize ISIS using Upworthy.”
- 21. “As abetted by for-profit technology companies, ad blocking is robbery, plain and simple -- an extortionist scheme that exploits consumer disaffection and risks distorting the economics of democratic capitalism.” -- Randall Rothenberg, CEO IAB
- 22. “IAB research shows ad-block use is caused by a general disdain for advertising and concern about the safety of user information. In our nationally representative survey, 89% of respondents who have installed ad-blocking technology reported using ad blockers to improve their experience. The ads deemed most intrusive are video ads that play automatically, screen takeovers, and blinking ads -- all ad types that directly disrupt the consumption of content.”
Editor's Notes
- I want to begin with a little thought experiment. Why do Americans pay their taxes?
- Ok, now a follow-up….
- Are they inherently less aware of financing their governments? Are they without a sense of the social contract? Are they ignorant of the value exchange, what the government provides with their tax payments? Come on. You know the answer It’s for exactly the same reason a dog licks his private parts:
- The Greek taxpayer can flout the law with impunity. The law! It’s not as if the civic duty to pay were some sort of tacit agreement, some unspoken compact., It is the law, and the penalty is prison.. But in those countries, the economies are so shadowy and the bureaucracies so helpless and the culture of impunity so ingrained that tax evasion brings little risk of detection, much less jail. In direct proportion with laxity of enforcement around the world, civic duty goes begging. Civilization is the subordination of personal interest to the interest of the community, and it works pretty well -- unless nobody’s looking. Then it tends to be every man for himself. Shorting the tax man is no different than flicking boogers on the carpet, speeding on the interstate or failing to sort your recyclables. Never mind the other folks, never mind the rules. Now, what if….
- ..what if the economic model were based on a quid pro quo that wasn’t a law, wasn’t a rule, wasn’t a deal, wasn’t a contract -- legal or social? The model depended on a value exchange involving you personally, but you –citizen -- had never, ever been asked for your consent, let alone your signature on the dotted line. What would you call that?
- It is a tax. For hundreds of years it depended on your attention, however grudging, in exchange for free and subsidized content. It was a fair tax. It was a good tax. It was an enormously lucrative tax for all four parties -- media, marketers, agencies, consumers -- who depended on it. But the consumers never agreed to pay it. No, they didn’t opt out, which suggested satisfaction, but that was just an assumption…. ….because they couldn’t. Now with ad blockers the captive audience can liberate itself from ad taxation, and with breathtaking speed and righteousness, it has. Choose your metaphor.
- The Greek taxpayer can flout the law with impunity. The law! It’s not as if the civic duty to pay were some sort of tacit agreement, some unspoken compact., It is the law, and the penalty is prison.. But in those countries, the economies are so shadowy and the bureaucracies so helpless and the culture of impunity so ingrained that tax evasion brings little risk of detection, much less jail. In direct proportion with laxity of enforcement around the world, civic duty goes begging. Civilization is the subordination of personal interest to the interest of the community, and it works pretty well -- unless nobody’s looking. Then it tends to be every man for himself. Shorting the tax man is no different than flicking boogers on the carpet, speeding on the interstate or failing to sort your recyclables. Never mind the other folks, never mind the rules. Now, what if….
- At first blush the template seems not unreasonable. Note, however, that the pure of heart over at Adblock Plus think imageswithin the ad are generally disqualifying. Images. Their Ad-topia is a cemetery of tombstones. There’s also the question of who the hell they are to be the arbiters of acceptability? It’s like having vegans create the Food Pyramid.
- Whose fault is it that ad blockers are the 21st century’s version of DDT, and as indiscriminately deployed, ridding us of a pestilence (pop-ups, autoplay, slow-loads, remnant spam, malware) but also doing grave harm to useful ad species and the publishing ecosystem as a whole?
- Ishey inundate us with both highly interruptive junk of no personal relevance and creepily targeted or re-targeted pitches that are so personally relevant they give us all the heebie jeebies. They’ve all but abandoned attempts at thoughtful engagement versus various ways of getting between us and the content until we can fumble to x them out of our way.
- As they moved online, they put all their chips on advertising, which had made them so obscenely profitable for three centuries. They failed to reckon with a few important realities: 1) Much of their audience scale would be "trash" audience, with no value to advertisers. 2) The glut of online content supply would be paralleled by a glut in ad inventory, driving down prices and necessitating much more clutter. 3) People hate ads. Hate 'em.. Once again, ads have never been anything but what we have to put up with in order to get free and subsidized content. Essentially, all ads are spam. 4) By going all-in on this strategy, they cemented the notion that all content deserves to be free – not only giving license to the public to renounce the historical quid pro quo, but leaving no viable revenue alternative.
- They ure us constantly into rabbit holes of sleaze, interrupting us, infecting us, deceiving us, defrauding us until we are at our wits’ end and just desperate to free ourselves from their onslaught?
- They are like gun manufacturers. They know their product is important when used judiciously by the right people in the right circumstances, but that it is ruinous to the entire society (and many innocent victims) when it is available to everybody. They may not be legally culpable for the damage, but they have blood or at least red ink -- on their hands. Or, how about….
- We were not born yesterday. We know that everything we visit online had a cost to produce, and that our part of the deal is a grudging acceptance of advertising. Anyone who sets up an ad blocker -- even the ones spouting the empty-headed nonsense about content being free -- knows he’s a freeloader. But it’s like stealing cable or sharing all-you-can-eat-salad-bar items or watching a second movie at the multiplex. It’s easy, and it feels like a righteous repudiation of The Man. Plus, while perhaps evidence of poor citizenship, it is totally legal.
- What publishers are experiencing, after all, is the logical outcome of technological change. The steam engine changed the economics of manufacturing, destroying the livelihoods of many a cobbler and seamstress. Yes, the change unleashed some of the uglier dimensions of runaway capitalism, but who exactly is to blame? Aren’t we are merely seeing the convergence of technology, denial, opportunism, rationalization, strategic blunder and human frailty to further undermine an economic sector already buffeted by digital revolution? Nobody is pure in this, but the one true culprit is inevitability. So what to do about it. I guess that’s why we’re here. Although, the big thinkers are soooo on top of the problem:
- Ooohhhh, don’t turn off the user! Excellent plan! Here’s a couple of other things you could try, too:
- No CMO ever convened the team to say, “How can we push more and more consumers away by feeding more ad units, no matter how irrelevant or repetitive, more intrusively?” And no publisher ever said, “How can we slow down the loading times on our pages and spike our users’ data charges with a bunch of irritating crap that keeps them from viewing the stuff we publish and they want to see?” Dude, it’s a structural problem not solved with three-point plans. See, for one thing, nobody will look at online or mobile ads unless the ad is jammed directly into their corneas, because why would they? Why? And secondly, because there is a (nearly infinite) glut of ad inventory, CPMs are so low no publisher can make the nut without serving more and more units, each trying to slap the user upside the face for just an instant of attention. And the more the ads intrude, the more the slap-happy users install ad blockers. “Not push things to people in a way that turns them off?”
- Robbery? Like splicing into the neighbor’s cable? Nope. That act is plainly theft, because it is physically tapping into a service otherwise available only for money under contract. And they aren’t extortionist, either.. Not even Ad Block Plus, to whom her refers. They are vigilantes roaming a vast, lawless territory, where robbers of your acquaintance do steal with impunity, where self-policing is a farce and where -- as a consequence -- the citizens are on the side of whoever is on their side. After having been abused for 20 years by advertisers, ad networks and unscrupulous and craven publishers, they are just plain fed up. And you understand that, because you said it yourself: