As we hit the home stretch in the Presidential election and other federal and statewide races, digital advertising spend continues to flourish.

But, candidates and their marketing teams may be fumbling on a key component of their playbook that could be the difference between first and second place: advertising to cookieless voters.

Google’s about-face (or flip flop) on deprecating cookies could lead advertisers — including political ones — to abandon their cookieless plans, but that would be shortsided as I explain below.

While the bulk of media attention is on the presidential election, there are also 468 Congressional races and a multitude of local elections. I would go as far as to say that a few politicians could sway their races by embracing cookieless, especially if their opponent neglects over half of the open web using Safari or Firefox browsers for example. There is an ocean of previously unreachable voters right in front of you, the billions of US consumers viewing content on cookieless browsers via mobile and desktop web.

It’s incredibly important to reach consumers where they consume content across mobile, desktop, or CTV. With emerging digital channels growing, those who do not advertise in cookieless environments may miss out on this campaign season’s biggest advantage.

Two Roads Ahead for the Candidates

Elections, at least in the United States, are often about choosing between two options. It’s either Republican or Democrat; left wing or right wing; yes or no on a proposition. Political candidates have some duality choices as well: whether to advertise only with third-party cookies, cookieless, or both. The good news is that candidates can — and should — advertise on both. But, like their for-profit corporate brethren, too few are embracing cookieless.

The polls make one thing abundantly clear: this will be a very close presidential election with multiple states currently within mere percentage points of each other. Even if the polls move in one direction or the other, there’s enough uncertainty that no one will know the winner until election night (and maybe thereafter).

The volume of ads seen in battleground states by the people who are legitimately swing votes are inundated with ads from both parties maligning their opponents and making conflicting claims. And while we historically think of TV ads as the bulk of political advertising, the money spent on digital continues to grow. Some estimates put it at 28% of all spent this cycle; 3x the figure from the last full election.

Valuable Audiences

Would Hillary Clinton have won the 2016 presidential election if she spent any time at all in Wisconsin? Flipping that state alone wouldn’t have procured enough electoral votes, but it was seen as emblematic of a campaign too confident in its superiority to a candidate to not do the simple work. She ended up losing the state by 23,000 votes as well as other important Midwest swing states like Michigan and Ohio. Today’s candidates need to assume nothing is certain and continue to reach every possible voter across the US.

Advertising allows candidates to  reach both cookieless and cookied users across all browsers.

Yes, Chrome dominates the browser market share with 52% in the US, 15% of those users have opted into cookieless settings, Safari has 32% and Firefox has 4% of audiences. There are plenty of registered and likely voters who may not watch much TV and are therefore only going to see political messages if those candidates advertise in cookieless environments.

Increased Attention Share

There’s a reason why both candidates prefer not to campaign in the same state at the same time. You don’t want to share the spotlight. Any candidate who embraces cookieless in a race where the competition doesn’t have a clear space to reach out to key audiences while the competitor is in the noisy cookied environment. Cookieless has a much lighter ad load overall, so every impression you serve has more impact.

It’s always interesting when someone living in an uncontested state travels to a swing state and suddenly sees the political ads they were missing.

Well, right now Internet users in swing states who are using cookieless browsers are just like those travelers. Campaigns that embrace cookieless can reach undecided voters in key regions on previously considered unreachable browsers.

Higher Performance

An underrated component of cookieless advertising is that ad load is generally faster in cookieless environments. Imagine paying good money to get in front of an undecided voter, only to waste that opportunity because the ad didn’t load before the user moved on. Finding the right audience is only one part of the equation; delivering your message clearly and completely is just as important. Cookieless achieves that.

Bigger Gains

Politicians love winning. Since there are far fewer bidders on ads in cookieless environments, win rates can be as high as 10X higher than bidding on third-party cookies. We also see engagement rates as high, if not higher, as in third-party cookie environments. This is crucial in the final weeks of the campaign when politicians have to spend before election day. Being in an environment with higher win rates alleviates stress that ads won’t run and allows the campaigns to focus on other pressing matters.

The Home Stretch

As with all campaign decisions, the best advertising strategies are built upon common sense. If you were driving to the polls, would you take the traffic-filled road or the wide open lane to get you to the polls before everyone else? Political campaigns often need everything to go right to win. Embracing cookieless this 2024 season could be the difference between getting elected versus giving a consolation speech.

The post This Campaign Season, Vote to Embrace Cookieless appeared first on AdMonsters.

This has been incredibly disruptive for both advertisers and their agency partners but it is publishers who have been most adversely impacted, losing as much as 70% of their revenue when the person visiting their website is using Safari because advertisers value the ability to segment, deliver and measure using cookies so greatly. 

Just as third-party cookies can be considered the backbone of addressable advertising on the open internet, Device IDs are the foundations of addressability for in-App Advertising.  On Apple handsets this ID this identifier is called Identifier for Advertisers (or IDFA) and just as Apple built the first major browser to incorporate privacy protection for its users, they plan to be the first major mobile OS to bring enhanced privacy to users of Apps on Apple devices through the App Tracking Transparency Framework, which will control the use of devices and other user identifiers such as email.

ITP Comes To Apps

This June at their Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Apple announced that when the next release of iOS arrived in the Fall it would have ITP-like features for Apps, it was called the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework.  

Unlike ITP and the open web, rather than blocking tracking in Apps by default, Apple is mandating that app publishers and developers ask for permission to collect and share data with third parties through a consent modal that appears when the user first opens the App. This news was not well received, and to a degree, the dark mood of app developers and publishers was understandable — in 2019 Apple estimated that their App Ecosystem supported in-App advertising sales of $45 billion. Just as ITP devastated the yields of publishers offering news that was free at the point of access, the ATT Framework has the potential to do the same for app developers.

Many (most notably Facebook) have complained about the broad scope of the ATT Framework and its potential impact on businesses. Complaints aside, publishers now require an opt-in to do any of the following:

1. To use an SDK in their App that combines user data from their App with that of others to target advertising or measure its effectiveness.
2. To share IDFAs & email addresses etc with a third-party advertising network, either for targeting or measurement purposes.
3. To share email lists with a data broker unless the data solely used for fraud prevention.

The ATT Framework is not only broad-reaching in terms of the use cases that an app developer or publisher requires consent for, but also the number of platforms impacted. The consent modal is not only required for iOS 14 Apps but also for the latest versions of iPadOS and tvOS. 

Implementing the ATT

As we mentioned above the ATT Consent Modal needs to be shown when a user first logs into the app. Once a user consents to data sharing, the App can continue to track users and share this information with third parties.

Not blocking all tracking by default is a welcome compromise and one that Apple likely made because the App store generates significant revenue for them in a way that the open web does not. But the mood amongst publishers on this change is quite dark, already: 30% of European iOS users opt-out of tracking at a system level, and if a large portion of the remaining 70% opt-out of tracking in their apps then the publisher’s audience is less targetable and less attractive to advertisers — therefore less valuable to publishers. We will look at the process of gaining consent in more detail below.

One positive is that publishers will have some creative license over how they ask for consent, although their creative license is limited to one sentence that explains for which purposes the data will be used. That being said a publisher can provide context prior to showing their user the ATT Modal, again we will look into this in more detail below. 

Managing Consent In Apps In iOS 14.5 and Beyond

We believe that for publishers, like DPG Media, that have a trusted relationship with their users, Apple’s ATT Framework will be less disruptive as consent rates will likely be higher than for less well-established businesses.

As a responsible publisher to be GDPR compliant we already use the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF currently version 2.1). This allows us to gain informed consent to personalize ads and offers the user much more granular controls vs Apple’s ATT Framework. 

But because the ATT framework is mandatory, we will need to do both. Effectively this means asking for consent to personalize twice. This coupled with gaining consent for push notifications effectively extends the onboarding process to five screens in an App: 

And of course, this complication in the onboarding process post app download has raised concerns amongst publishers that the consent rates will be negatively impacted.

The best way to manage this is to guide users through this new step and help them make a well-informed decision on their privacy tolerances. We believe that by doing this, publishers can maintain trust amongst users which in turn will result in better opt-in rates and the maximization of yield from content.

The post Managing Consent in Apps in iOS 14.5 and Beyond appeared first on AdMonsters.

Over on Reddit, publishers are reporting they’re receiving loads of emails from senders identifying themselves as reps from some kind of agency or another, demanding their company be added to the publisher’s Ads.txt file or else they’ll stop buying that publisher’s inventory. By the sound of this Reddit thread, a lot of the time these messages are coming from companies the publisher’s ops team has never heard of. AdExchanger reported on this story as well. Fortunately, AdExchanger’s read is that not many pubs are biting at these messages. It sounds like some wishful thinking for these small-potatoes agencies and marketing companies—they’re asking to be added to the publisher’s Ads.txt even when they aren’t buying the publisher’s inventory yet, but might want to in the future. The twist is that there’s nothing in the Ads.txt initiative that prevents many of those agencies from buying inventory from many of these publishers. Ads.txt is just intended to prevent unauthorized reselling of the pub’s inventory. Publishers hold the high ground in this battle, for once. Good thing they’re choosing to talk to each other before ceding it.

… And More Publishers Are Getting On Board With Ads.txt

Ben Kneen of Ad Ops Insider updated his figures on Ads.txt adoption. In the first 100 days of Ads.txt, 13% of the 10,000 most popular ad-selling websites had implemented it. He posted that figure in mid-September. Since then, the number shot up to 44% of those same 10,000 sites. Kneen suggests this might be “a record for publisher embrace of any IAB standard.” He chalked up the uptick to the Sept. 21 announcement that Google DBM would stop buying from unauthorized supply paths by the end of October, endorsing the Ads.txt initiative. Digiday pointed out how Google’s been assertive with Ads.txt adoption: They’ve added a tab in DFP showing publishers which ad sellers have listed their domains, and they’ve helped publishers set up their own Ads.txt files.

No More Buy-Side Fees for Rubicon, Following Auction Experiments

Rubicon Project did away with buy-side fees earlier this week. AdExchanger reports the company has been reducing its take rates since 2016, and eliminating buy-side fees will continue to push down those rates. According to Rubicon CEO Michael Barrett, they need to get those rates down to 10-15% in order to be competitive. Sounds like they’ve been looking for ways to do that as painlessly as possible: While experimenting with its auction models last month, Rubicon found modified first-price auctions with no buyer fees brought about more revenue for publishers and increased win rates for buyers. And reportedly that worked out better for everyone involved than other auction models it had played with.

Rubicon will continue charging publisher fees, and platform access fees to buyers who are too small-stakes for Rubicon to profit from their spending. Barrett said publisher fees were more stable overall than buyer fees: “Boy, did we live a dynamic roller coaster with [buy-side fees] this year,” he commented. Meanwhile, overall spending coming through the Rubicon platform has been in decline versus last year.

Does Header Cause Lack of Transparency, or Expose It?

My colleague Gavin Dunaway went to Ad:Tech NY this week, where a casual comment from Scott Spencer, Director, Product Management at Google, sent him riffing. Spencer said header tags have caused transparency issues in the industry. Might as well roll up Gavin’s response on Twitter into one package: “Header tags have caused transparency issues? Uh, they were there before. A lot of transparency issues can be attributed to the closed nature of DFP. The header leveled the playing field, allowing pubs to get all their inventory accurately valued. Domain spoofing and arbitrage existed long before rise of the header; header may have exposed their profligacy. But the other issue is blind cookie chasing at the lowest price possible. People keep saying that if it sounds too good to be true. It probably is… but that message has yet to resonate with buyers (particularly when they have spend they need to ditch).”

Safari Cookie-Blocking Fallout Hits Exchanges

A couple weeks back, we mentioned the toll Apple’s new-ish cookie policy for Safari was taking on programmatic-heavy publishers. Now AdExchanger is reporting its effect on the exchanges: Their headline on that subject read, “Apple’s Safari Tracking Changes Costs Criteo $1M In Q3, And Could Cost A Minimum Of $20M In Q4.” That says plenty, as is. For the sake of context, Criteo was projecting $260-$263 million in revenue for Q4 2017. But the company is not taking this lying down: They’ve developed a work-around that hinges on a cookie-less identifier that works across different sites and servers. That method is still compliant with Apple’s cookie policy.

The post Weekly News Roundup: Ads.txt Catches On (To Some Agencies’ Chagrin), Transparency in the Header, More appeared first on AdMonsters.

On Tuesday, Digiday reported time-based guarantees have “hit a wall,” as the popular discussion in digital advertising has moved on to things like brand safety. Reading the coverage, though, it sounds like Digiday has reached this conclusion by talking to a publisher who’s seeing fewer time-based campaigns coming through the door, a publisher who’s satisfied with time-based ad sales at the moment, and a publisher who says it’s too soon to predict the future of time-based deals. If time-based deals are slowing down, though, I want to know: Does that mean their moment in the limelight is over, or that it hasn’t truly arrived yet? AdMonsters has been championing transacting on time, and other attention-based metrics, for a long time, and we’re holding out for them. The buy side is usually slow to adopt new approaches. New tech solutions that make the process more efficient—which time-based sales can really use at this point—may accelerate adoption. Our take is that where we’re at with time-based transactions is more a symptom of a slow ramp-up than of a quick death.

Artificial Intelligence’s Slow Burn Heats Up

This week, eMarketer released a new report, “Artificial Intelligence for Marketers 2018: Finding Value Beyond the Hype.” AI has been around for decades, in one capacity or another, and it helps people perform basic tasks on the internet constantly without the average layperson even noticing. But AI is a hot topic right now among marketers, and that’s a more recent and overt development. So why now? Well, it’s taken a while for marketers, broadly, to understand how it can work for them. We might suggest, in addition, that AI is hitting a certain scale and pricepoint where marketers can explore its potential.

Apple Cookie-Blocking Already Costs Publishers Big Bucks

Last month, Apple changed its policy for handling first-party cookies in Safari. At the time, I and a bunch of other people predicted the changes would create problems in mobile for publishers, specifically by pushing advertisers toward Facebook’s large logged-in audience. Digiday reported this week that some programmatic-heavy publishers have already been feeling the effects of the new cookie policy, and it’s hitting them right in the bottom line. CafeMedia’s Paul Bannister went on record to say his company’s CPMs in Safari are roughly 10% lower than what he’d expected for this time of year. Meanwhile, Ranker’s Clark Benson saw its yield on Androidincrease compared to Safari.

Video Distribution Works for GQ

GQ has been hard at work arguing a case against the old line that publishers can’t make money from distributing video on social media platforms. And evidently it’s paying off for them. Digiday details that video model this week, and summarizes it as: “Build something that works with GQ’s direct audience, then package it for its distributed viewers.” The strategy involves producing video series, and distributing them across GQ’s O&Os, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. They’ve taken care to look at what lengths of video, content verticals, and metrics work best for which platforms. Over here at AdMonsters, we’ll be exploring video distribution strategies in our next playbook, “Building a Video Business.” For the interim, GQ’s story offers a compelling case study.

Senate Bill Demands Disclosure from Digital Political Ad Buys

A new bill was introduced to the U.S. Senate this week, with the goal of requiring more disclosures around political ad campaigns running on large digital platforms. It’s called the Honest Ads Act, and according to Recode, the proposed law would affect political ad buys of $500 or more on any digital property (i.e., site, social network app, ad network) that nets at least 50 million unique U.S. visitors per month in at least six months of any year. When a political ad buy meets those criteria, the platform running the ads will need to disclose data around who or what the entity buying the ads is, what audiences they’re targeting, and the cost of the ad inventory. In other words, if passed, the law would hold digital platforms to a similar standard that broadcasters and newspapers are held to, where political ads are concerned. The Honest Ads Act comes along following ongoing revelations in the news about the extent to which Russian agents had bought ads on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and elsewhere, in an attempt to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mark Warner (D-VA) sponsored the bill, with support from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

Zombie Sites Ate Ad Spend from Major Brands

BuzzFeed reporters say they’ve uncovered an ad fraud scheme, in which ads from more than 100 brands ran on “zombie sites” populated with pirated content or gobbledygook. The scheme is described as a session-jacking redirect ploy, and BuzzFeed indicated all the sites implicated were running code from 301network, operated by Nashville-based marketing agency 301 Digital Media. The company’s CEO has denied knowledge of any fraudulent activity and stated the company is in the process of shutting down its ad network. It’s still unclear how wide-ranging this scheme was or is, but BuzzFeed claimed it’s possible bad actors could have pinched millions of dollars.

The post Weekly News Roundup: The State of Time-Based Deals, Safari Cookie-Blocking Hurts Pub Revenue, More appeared first on AdMonsters.

All right, it’s not that simple, but Apple’s updated cookie policy for its Safari browser feels like the company is twisting the knife a few more degrees, making its own rules without making any real concessions to the rest of the industry. (That’s not to say no one else in the industry stands to benefit… but the likely beneficiaries don’t need much of an assist. More on that in a bit.) Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default for ages. Seeing as Safari is the iPhone’s default browser, that cookie impediment has helped accelerate alternate, more convoluted ways of tracking consumer behavior across multiple devices. Apple’s new policy, and update to its June 2017 Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) announcement, takes this a step further and places restrictions on the use of first-party cookies in Safari. Using machine learning techniques, ITP will scour sites for assets originating from other sites, and it will segment cookies from those sites. After 24 hours, those cookies will become unavailable. After 30 days, if the user hasn’t gone back to the site in question, those cookies will be deleted.

Told you it wasn’t that simple. What it means, effectively, is that in logged-in environments, like Google and Facebook, it’ll still be possible to use cookies for tracking, as long as the user keeps coming back before the time limits kick in. For a third-party ad exchange, it would appear the situation is much more problematic. The 24-hour limit would hinder targeting across the exchange’s partner sites, and the 30-day limit stands to muck up post-campaign measurement.

Apple says this decision is about building up users’ trust in digital, that tracking users without their consent breeds mistrust. But six digital media and marketing trade groups issued an open letter yesterday saying the “trust” bit is hogwash, and decrying Apple for making a unilateral decision on behalf of all Safari users. The letter—signed by the 4As, ANA, IAB, AAF, DMF and NAI—went on to call Apple’s cookie policy “opaque and arbitrary” and suggest it will “hurt the user experience and sabotage the economic model for the internet.”

I’m inclined to agree, more or less. User trust in digital fosters deeper engagement, which is better for publishers and advertisers. Trust comes from transparency, and any companies with a stake in digital advertising ought to do their part to educate users about what they’re doing. Apple is skipping ahead with ITP, making decisions for Safari users without educating users and allowing them to make their own privacy choices. Even for people who are conversant in the moving parts that allow digital advertising to be distributed, Apple’s new policy can be hard to follow. For people who aren’t in the business of knowing this stuff already, it’s a total headache.

Safari has a heavy foothold in mobile, but depending on who you ask, its share of the browser market is somewhere around 18%. By comparison, Chrome still nabs more mobile browser market share by a long shot. The ITP policy serves to only further chip away at an already fragmented space. The industry at large hasn’t “solved” cross-device measurement. It sounds right now like Apple is okay with hobbling that process of mastering cross-device ad targeting before platforms and publishers can give users the opportunity to choose whether or not they want to be on the receiving end of it.

Mobile monetization is an ongoing sore spot for publishers at large. Creating a Safari-sized blind spot in the ecosystem would seem to only push more mobile advertiser spend toward Facebook Audience Network, where they have a logged-in and verified audience at scale. That’s not ideal for publishers, who have concerns about opacity around the data FAN gives or doesn’t give them. At first glance, it appears Apple is handing a big ol’ gift to the Duopoly here, and it feels like a premature decision.

Apple’s ultimate goal here might become clearer as time progresses and the industry reacts. At the moment, it seems like this is a call to accelerate cookieless cross-device tracking methods, and for publishers and vendors to form new kinds of partnerships. The ad-supported model isn’t going anywhere, and those who are invested in it will need to find some new workarounds in mobile.

The post Apple’s Cookie-Blocking Policy Is a Gift to the Duopoly appeared first on AdMonsters.

And yet, despite all those morbid proclamations, it’s 2017 and we’re still living with Flash. In the publisher-side ad ops world, folks are living with a heck of a lot more Flash than they’d really like. Apple, Google and Mozilla couldn’t kill it by having Flash disabled by default in Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Publishers will tell you (or anyone willing to listen to them vent for a few minutes) how creative agencies seem to be unable to break their Flash habits. If Flash is what agencies are most comfortable building in, and if agencies are more comfortable sending lightweight Flash files out into the pipes instead of those much larger HTML5 files, then Flash is what publishers will get in ad creative. If the publisher doesn’t like it, they’ll have to figure out how to deal with it—using a DIY Flash-to-HTML5 converter tool, onboarding a rich media vendor company, working alongside buy-side clients to rebuild ad files, or whatever else works.

Flash has survived for years in spite of so many influential parties’ attempts to the contrary. We saw Steve Jobs rail against Flash. We’ve seen major browsers disable Flash. We’ve seen publishers try to put the pressure on advertisers to just tear off that Band-Aid and stop building in Flash. We’ve seen Google and Mozilla seemingly try to put a pillow over Flash’s face, by ceasing development on their Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools, Swiffy and Shumway, respectively. It had become clear enough that the only way Flash was going to die would be if Adobe itself pulled the plug.

But considering Adobe is looking at the end of 2020 as Flash’s kill-by date—that means we’re still going to have nearly three and a half more years before it’s over. To frame it another way, December 2020 is five and a half years beyond the point in 2015 when Google announced it would start pausing Flash content in Chrome! We’re in the middle of a long march to the sea, my friends.

Predicting what might happen in three years of ad tech and digital media is about as useful as a long-range weather forecast in the northeastern U.S. You’re welcome to give it a shot. But regardless, shutting down Flash will likely accelerate some of those opportunities we’ve been hearing about to take a lead in bringing the ad space up to date, and maybe to profit in the process. A lot of tech vendors have been receiving and distributing Flash creative from advertiser clients without pushing back—they haven’t had the incentive, because they’ve gotten paid one way or another. But if there’s money to be made in offering services to convert Flash files to HTML5, we might see more vendors adding that tool to their kits. Some publishers are doing this already, on their own part, and charging buy-side clients for the trouble. It’ll possibly be a brief window of time to capitalize on, though—the awareness is present now, but if Flash goes away, so will the opportunity to convert it to HTML5.

But when that happens—imagine all that HTML5 creative flowing through mobile channels, the way it’s supposed to in mobile. What will that do for ad experience, and for publishers’ ability to monetize their mobile web properties? One can dream. Hopefully it won’t take three years to get an answer.

The post Adobe Sets a 2020 Expiration Date for Flash: Now What? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Indeed, ad blocking came up in many a PubForum session, with opening Keynote Mitch Weinstein of Magna Global saying it was an issue that brings supply and demand sides together (rivals schools united by… ABP?). We had to break up the excellent breakout session on ad blocking because hotel management demanded its space back… And I think other guests may have complained about the wailing and moaning.

For most digital publishers, ad blocking is a looming storm cloud. Despite the contested reports of ad blocking’s effect on digital revenue, many publishers report their ad blocker levels are manageable – not significant enough to warrant action. 

And consider the not-bad side of ad blocking – if all ad blockers were to shut off tomorrow, the web would be flooded with impressions, mainly of the mediocre variety, which in turn would likely force CPMs down (way down). Another industry resource even suggested to me that ad blocking is a distraction from serious developments – namely, viewability.

But what highlights the perils of ad blockers is Apple’s launch of iOS9 and Safari’s open door to ad- and content-blocking software developers. This could prove a serious threat to mobile web revenue.

The mobile web itself has long been a problem, and not just from a monetization standpoint. Publishers can’t drive nearly as much revenue per pageview as on desktop, so they’ve introduced some ugly, mobile-specific units, like hard-set banners. These and other unsightly units have marred mobile web user experience not just on an aesthetic level, but also in terms of data-suckage. 

Commenters on a wrong-headed Verge piece about lackluster mobile browsers pointed out that although the article itself weighed 8KB, the mobile page loaded a total of 9MB worth of content… A good chunk of it advertising. Chucking all that bloat not only saves data but also significantly improves site loading times. So on the mobile web, users might turn to ad blockers because ads are both annoying/distracting and siphoning away their data. 

The good news? The new mobile ad blockers only work in browsers, so the app environment is safe, and users currently prefer this channel for accessing mobile content. Still, the mobile web has long been stealing user traffic from desktop, and revenue efforts will further dwindle with the introduction of ad blockers. 

What’s to be done? Certain companies are enabling publishers to replace blocked ads with different types of ads (think text-based AdWords), while others are offering the ability to bypass the blockers. However, whether such techniques will work with iOS’ content blockers is to be seen. Never forget, the most popular ad blocker, AdBlock Plus, will serve your advertising if you pay up. 

In the near term, publishers might be able to hasten their woes with a mobile web ad strategy that’s less dependent on display ads, instead leaning on native and other alternative revenue streams (e.g., content to commerce, particularly with rising mobile commerce).

Of course, I’m intrigued by the idea of stopping users with ad blockers and offering them the option of paying cash for content or being served advertising (and sharing data). As I’ve argued before, this choice should have long been offered to consumers, but another source brought up the good point that time and again, paywalls have proved ineffective, particularly as users can find similar (or perhaps just repurposed) content elsewhere. 

But I argue we’re going to see a gradual growth in publisher brand loyalty, particularly as publishers stop chasing pageviews and impressions in favor of building audiences, while the industry adopts time-based attention and engagement metrics. That’s a whole other story that I’ll soon by trying to tackle.

OK, ad-block-alypse is an exaggeration – I needed a clever headline. Also, ad-block-alapocalyse reminded us all of Snuffleupagus. Ad blocking is a growing concern for publishers on desktop, particularly since younger users (milleni-somethings?) are more likely to use ad-blocking extensions. But the real sweating should be reserved for ad block’s expanding role in the mobile monetization quandary. Your first move – review and improve your mobile web strategy.

The post #OPSPOV: Mobile Web Summons the Ad-Block-alypse appeared first on AdMonsters.

If you think the Internet is a complimentary lunch buffet, I got some bad news for you. I wince every time a digital thought leader makes a comment about the “free Internet.” The transaction between most Internet content providers and users is something I’ve always referred to as the “unspoken handshake” – users pay for their content consumption with personal data as well as by allowing advertisers the opportunity to reach them.

The use of ad blockers nullifies this agreement. With the growing concern over ad blockers’ effect on publisher revenue, highlighted by Apple leaving the door open to ad blocking in upcoming versions of Safari, this is probably the right moment to debate the handshake – truly formalize it and effectively kill the notion of the free Internet. 

Ad-Blocking Safari

Ad blocking capability on Safari is the latest bit of bad news, following a German court ruling that the AdBlock Plus extension (made by Eyeo) is not “anti-competitive.” This was a big blow for the two prominent German publishers who brought the action as well as a worrying precedent for the entirety of Europe, where use of ad blockers is already rampant – Germany in particular records ad blocking extensions on 40% to 50% of browsers.

The numbers don’t look pretty in the U.S. either – 28% of users pack an ad blocker according to a 2014 Adobe-PageFair study (PDF), but use seems to vary based on content vertical. Gaming sites have long had high ad-blocking numbers, as more tech-inclined audiences have a higher propensity to use extensions. And guess what generation grew up with the Internet? Yup, 41% of Millennials are reportedly using ad blockers.

AdBlock Plus is the major player on the block, with 40-50 million active monthly users according to Eyeo communications and operations director Ben Williams. However, the product has seen stiff competition of late from upstart challenger Ublock, which is reportedly less reliant on user memory though pubs reports it blocks non-ad-related services like analytics. 

If you’ve got the cash, you can pay AdBlock Plus to pass on through your ads like Google, Amazon and others have done in a scheme that pretty much amounts to blackmail: 30% of ad revenue gained by being on the company’s precious whitelist. And here you wondered how free software makes money!

It also makes me curious – why would users employ an ad-blocking extension that lets through ads? Well, AdBlock Plus actually offers a few levels of blocking: all ads or just “unacceptable” ads – you can read about those in the “Acceptable Ads Manifesto,” but they include ads that are “annoying,” “distort… page content” and other vague descriptions. (A source suggests that AdBlock Plus is currently backlogged with publisher inquests.)

Premium pubs are seeing varied numbers of blockers coming through, but it’s definitely on the rise and raising alarms as viewability and bot traffic are cutting into inventory. 

But why the uptick in blockers now? Have ads grown more annoying? Well, a bit, with the proliferation of video – particularly auto-play video-in-display ads with sound on. (Coincidentally, Google is adding a program-pausing feature to Chrome that will basically kill such advertising – as well as Flash.) Content recommendation ads sport a lineup of sponsored content that’s barely removed from belly fat and one-strange-trick bullshit. And then consider that ad blockers are easy to install and tend to be a top extension in most browser marketplaces.

What’s more worrisome is mobile, where publishers have notably struggled with their revenue strategies, is the next frontier for ad blocking. AdBlock Plus recently launched a fully armored browser for Android. The mobile carriers themselves are interested in ad-blocking technology as Shine CMO Roi Carthy suggests units like popups and auto-play video can account for 10% to 50% of network traffic.

And then Apple announced that the upcoming version of Safari could support ad blocking. This is a real kick in the gut as publishers have especially struggled with the mobile web and, according to StatCounter, Safari accounts for 55% of mobile traffic.

Evasive Maneuvers

Hey, you know what’s showing a lot of promise on mobile? Native ads and other in-feed units. In fact, at OPS two weeks ago I was quite impressed hearing about units that fit seamlessly into the mobile content array and can be transacted on programmatically. So increased native units should be a way to get around those pesky ad blockers, right?

Well, according to Monday Note, ad blockers have developed capabilities to detect units labeled as sponsored and stamp them out. In addition, AdBlock Plus has put the kibosh on content recommendation widgets.

There are services out there that have ways of evading ad blockers – interesting ones at that. PageFair can be used to measure ad blocking activity and then substitute blocked spots with affiliate ads. Publishers that build or employ third-party ad-block detectors can potentially switch in text ads when display units are blocked. Content-to-commerce solutions, which use affiliate linking, also escape the ad block knife.

Other products promise to straight up ignore or bypass ad blocking extension. That gets into seemingly murky territories – should publishers feel bad for subverting user wishes? I argue no, because ad-blocking users are effectively stealing content.

The Spoken Handshake

It’s always seemed curious to me that people just expect Internet content to be free – it probably has something to do with the intangible nature of digital media. I’m guilty of this mindset as well, as a few strongly worded letters from my old cable company will point out. (I swear I’ve turned over a new leaf… Now that I have HBO Now.) 

In effect, this misconception of a free Internet devalues content, so content makers deliver low-value content. Theoretically the content behind paywalls should be better, but you’ll notice that most brands pushing paywalls (e.g., Wall Street Journal, New York Times) are well established. How are varied upstart and niche pubs supposed to drive enough traffic (and revenue) to insert a paywall?

But people are willing to pay for content, Gavin – look at the freakout among users when Netflix was simply testing ads (for its own shows, nonetheless – HBO Now shows pre-roll clips for HBO originals on its originals). An informal survey (of a whole 100 Netflix users!) from Exstreamist found 79% (or 79 people) said they’d rather pay more for the service than be subjected to (oh, the horror) advertising. 

I’m going to lay a hard truth on you – people are whiners, people love to whine about advertising and people that fill out surveys tend to be the whiniest whiners on the whine-path. If Netflix raised its subscription rate to $30 tomorrow but said you could keep paying $10 if you occasionally had to view commercials, I bet more people would jump on the latter option.

Still, this is a prime time to test user willingness to pay cold, hard cash for content – hence Google’s Contributor gambit, offering reduced ad loads for a monthly fee. It’s an interesting subscription model, though completely experimental. Spotify and Pandora have proved freemium digital content models can work.

But the majority of digital publishers can drive a lot more revenue from ad dollars. Some sites are building off cookie warnings to first-time visitors and using pop-ups to ask for users to turn off their ad blockers because content is ad-supported. I think we all have a sinking feeling about how effective those pleas will be. Monday Note reports that Schibsted in Scandinavia is encouraging sites to shut the gates to browsers carrying with ad block extensions – I think all sites should follow its lead.

Blocking content could lose you segments of your audience – then again, you can’t monetize the audience you’re losing. Ad-blocking users may boost your traffic figures, but if you can’t actually serve them advertising, you’re not being honest to your clients about your reach.

No, for too long we’ve been silent about the unspoken handshake – the deal that users get content while pubs record data and offer advertisers their attention. Through ad blockers, (some) users haven’t kept up their end of the bargain, but most publishers also haven’t given them an alternate way to pay for the content they consume: money. Dollars, euros, pounds, yuans, etc. 

I’ve long advocated for such a dual approach – offer site visitors the option to pay for content with advertising and data (and further I look to a day when consumers can truly take agency of transacting on their data), or ask them to pay in monies. If neither option appeals to them, refuse to show them content.

This is why the launch of Sourcepoint caught my attention: this new company from Ben Barokas is truly trying to bring the unspoken handshake upfront by prompting a user visiting a site to turn off their ad blocker or pay cash for an ad-free edition. I’ve been waiting a while to see such an offering and I imagine other providers will step up with such services in SourcePoint’s wake. At the same time, adoption of the spoken handshake will be wary because publishers will fear a consumer revolt, and how do you price that subscription?

Another Long Debate 

The conversation about ad blockers will only get more intense over the coming months – I imagine our session at the Publisher Forum in Charleston will be quite heated. And hey, I hear the IAB is forming a committee! I bet you guys can’t wait for the deluge of panels and possibly whole conferences.

Still, don’t let your ad-blocking worries consume you because while recent news has brought the issue to the trade headlines, it hasn’t become a serious threat to premium publishers yet. You can prepare by learning about workarounds like PageFair, ClarityRay (recently acquired by Yahoo!) and AdDefend and the struggle is leading to a better Internet for all parties – yes, even users.

There is one immediate takeway for publishers – be smart about what kind of advertising you allow on your site. Quality assurance has never been so important, or difficult when it comes to programmatic. Basically, don’t be a part of the problem – eschew units that might irritate more users into joining the ad blocking mob.

The post #OPSPOV: Ad Blockers at the Gates – Mobile Safari Opens the Door appeared first on AdMonsters.