Ad blocking was last decade’s big problem, right? It is no longer seen as an existential crisis; it’s become a back burner issue.

Why? Consumer adoption rates seemed to have slowed down. Mitigation solutions like Acceptable Ads and adblock walls took the revenue-hit sting out. A sense of hopelessness set in as many believed that they could achieve nothing more. Other looming crises—like signal loss and traffic loss—took center stage. It became a minor headache, easily ignored by popping an Acceptable Ads-laced aspirin.

Now, are you ready to take the red pill or the blue pill? If you take the blue pill, the story ends. You return to GAM and believe whatever you want to believe. If you take the red pill, you enter the blocked web, and I show you how deep the revenue hole goes.

The Red Pill

Let’s start with a hard fact. The majority of your adblocking audience is invisible to you. It does not appear in dashboards like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or in-house reports. It doesn’t even show up in existing adblocking analytics. Off-grid.  

This is dark traffic. You can’t see it. But it’s very much there. 

We are talking about big numbers here. On average, 14-21% of a publisher’s total audience is uncaptured and unmeasured dark traffic. Put another way, the adblocking audience you are currently measuring is just 20-30% of what is actually there.

Sounds sinister? Yes and no. Dark traffic comprises regular people (not bots) accessing your website. People who buy stuff and have above-average disposable incomes. They are hidden from view because they are using a new generation of adblocking software that makes them undetectable by existing solutions in the marketplace.

This is great because you have an audience you didn’t know about. But it’s bad because it’s unmeasured and, even worse, unmonetized. 

This new generation of adblocking software doesn’t just block analytics. It also blocks or doesn’t permit a bunch of other stuff that publishers have come to rely upon: Acceptable Ads, adblock walls, cookie-banners (CMPs), and in-house promotions (e.g., newsletter sign-ups). Because this new generation is so ruthless, we call them brutal adblockers.

The Cause of Dark Traffic

When folks in the industry talk about “adblockers” today, they refer to browser extensions like AdBlock and Adblock Plus. Owned by a company called eyeo, they became the dominant force that drove mainstream adblocking adoption from 2013-2019. 

These adblockers are known for being somewhat hospitable to publishers, albeit for self-serving reasons. For example, eyeo set up Acceptable Ads, allowing publishers to run analytics, adblock walls, and cookie-banners. For this reason, we refer to them as soft adblockers.

Although soft adblockers have grown in usage, they have dramatically lost market share. In 2015, AdBlock and Adblock Plus commanded 80%+ of adblocked page views online. Today, it’s in the region of 25-30%. Therefore, this is the ratio of your adblocked audience that will see Acceptable Ads.

What generates the other 70%+? You guessed it: brutal adblockers that cause dark traffic. There are now 700m+ users globally. Much of this has materialized in the years since COVID-19—the open web’s inconvenient truth.

Who Are the Brutal Adblockers?

When I talk to publishers about this, one of the questions I get asked is, ‘Who are the brutal adblockers?’ If eyeo via Adblock and Adblock Plus isn’t ruling the roost anymore, who is?

Well, it’s not so much a single who, but many players. The adblocking software market has become fragmented. Many companies are getting a slice of the action, offering adblocking through various types of products (it’s no longer mainly limited to browser extensions). 

Adblocking software is available through built-in browsers, operating system applications, VPNs, and at the network level. Hundreds of providers exist across these categories, with popular examples being AdGuard, uBlock Origin, and Brave. 

Most of these providers are brutal adblockers, having found eager user bases dissatisfied with the approach and limitations of AdBlock and Adblock Plus.

Collectively, they’re an unacknowledged audience.

The Brutal Adblocker Era

It’s time to acknowledge that we are in a new era. An era where the terms of the adblockers themselves have fundamentally changed. eyeo, through AdBlock and Adblock Plus, is no longer the main stakeholder and intermediary to which publishers can reach a value exchange compromise with adblocking users. Nor are other methodologies, like adblock walls, effective if blocked.

It’s time to think about adblocking differently. Publishers should build a direct relationship with users of brutal adblocking software and reintroduce a sustainable monetization mechanism.

Realistically, micropayments and subscriptions aren’t going to work for most publishers. The only viable option is to reintroduce ads, using resilient ad delivery that doesn’t get blocked. Today, it is possible to do this—to restore a publisher’s ad stack to brutal adblocking users with ads that users find agreeable and user-centric.

That may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. As eyeo has proven with Acceptable Ads for its soft adblockers, users do not have binary preferences: ads or no ads. Instead, they are open to seeing non-interruptive ads if those are the terms presented to them.

Brutal adblocking users are no different. There’s a clear distinction between the software and the people using it. One is not reflective of the other. While brutal adblocking software is extreme to the extent of what it blocks on publisher websites, its users are regular people. They’re not fanatics. They’re teachers, accountants, students, and doctors. Sometimes, they are using a brutal adblocker by default (e.g., it runs on their employer’s network), and sometimes, it’s because they can (spoiler: most people would rather not see ads if that’s an option).

Publishers that can directly control the terms of their advertising experience while preserving their readers’ preferences and trust will win.

The post Dark Traffic Is Costing Publishers 14-21% of Their Revenue – What Is It? appeared first on AdMonsters.

The advertising ecosystem relies on a delicate balance between user experience, publisher monetization, and advertiser reach. Ads keep the open web free, a reality most consumers recognize and accept. The publisher is responsible for curating user experiences that incorporate ads effectively. When your audience is fed overwhelming or distracting ads, they curtail that experience by using ad blockers or visiting other sites.

And when that happens, publishers lose out on potential revenue. Littering a user’s experience with excessive or disruptive ads is not the key to engagement nor does it create an effective campaign. Publishers who go this route end up producing a bad experience for their users and advertising partners, and they also take a hit on revenue. 

Making the user experience a top priority helps publishers succeed. “When you take the user-centric approach and respect their choices, you build a loyal readership base which leads to a profitable, long-lasting business model,” notes Jan Wittek, Chief Revenue Officer at eyeo. 

Ad Blocking Versus Ad Filtering: It Makes a Difference 

A new survey from Censuswide (on behalf of Ghostery) shows that more than half of Americans (and 912 million people globally) use ad blockers. Ad blockers might improve the user experience, but they can negatively affect many stakeholders in the digital advertising ecosystem.

For publishers, the average desktop adblock rate is 10-40%. The projected cost of ad blocking in 2024 for publishers is $54 billion, which is ~8% of the total projected global digital ad spend of $695 billion, according to eyeo’s 2023 Ad-Filtering Report. Without ad filtering and other mitigation tools this loss could have been as high as $116 billion.

Unlike ad blockers that block all ads, ad filtering technology filters out annoying and disruptive ads, leaving fewer, unobtrusive ads that are more likely to make an impact. Over 300 million web users choose ad filtering rather than ad blocking to ensure a more pleasant online experience. 

This technology, offered by eyeo, powers ad-filtering tools like AdBlock and Adblock Plus, and publisher solutions like Blockthrough. Built in compliance with the Acceptable Ads Standard, the tech empowers real-world users and industry stakeholders to determine which ads are in compliance with the standard based on user research and criteria including quantity, placement, and format. Users who would rather filter ads than block them all can implement AdBlock Plus or AdBlock browser extensions. Blockthrough ensures publishers are only serving compliant ads.

“In a typical ad block environment, the ad blocker stops the ad from running in the first place, which results in the publisher failing to earn any money from that user. But with Blockthrough, we can detect if there’s an ad blocker present and if it’s compliant with Acceptable Ads. If so, we can restore the publisher’s existing demand stack and re-run the ad auction in an ad-filtered environment,” explains Wittek. 

After analyzing each ad for compliance, Blockthrough creates a pool of bids, and the winning bid with the highest CPM is rendered on the publisher’s page. This allows ad tech companies to monetize ad block users without compromising their experience.

Giving Users the Best Experience Online

A recent survey conducted by eyeo and CCM Benchmark shows that many internet users (83%) would be happy to see non-intrusive, relevant ads online. These are younger, more tech-savvy users who understand that ads keep content on the internet free but do not want ads to affect their experience negatively. eyeo’s solutions keep the internet uncluttered for ad-filtering users while giving publishers the opportunity to reach agreeable users to increase engagement and grow revenue. 

“The ad tech ecosystem is made up of users, advertisers, and publishers and the reality is that they all rely on one another. Any time the pendulum swings too far in any direction, it jeopardizes the ecosystem. Ad filtering creates the most mutually beneficial balance between user experience, publisher monetization, and advertiser reach,” says Wittek. This gives users control over their experience and privacy and allows publishers to continue offering free, accessible content.

Currently, 96% of ad-filtering users are actively taking action to protect their privacy online. eyeo focuses on giving users control over their privacy while still supporting high-quality content creators. This provides users with an improved experience while publishers get incremental revenue and advertisers increase views.

Keeping the Internet Free Through Advertising 

Many users understand that the ads they see help to keep the content they access on the internet free, but they do not want to be bombarded with advertisements at every turn. Ad filtering can help achieve the right balance; ads on pages with less clutter are more memorable.

Users want a fair value exchange for seeing ads, with the keyword being “fair,” meaning the ads are unobtrusive, respectful, and relevant. According to eyeo’s 2023 Ad Filtering Report, 79% of ad-filtering users are open to seeing ads that don’t interfere with their content. So, placement matters. Smart publishers are revamping their websites to reduce the number of ads on their pages, not only to increase the speed of the page but to improve their visitors’ ad experience. And, it’s working. They’re seeing higher engagement and increased revenue.

eyeo’s ad-filtering solutions enable user control while serving ads, though these are fewer, less interruptive ads that meet an objective ad standard. According to the company, publishers can uphold a positive user experience while regaining 15-20% of lost pageviews and recurring, incremental revenue. Advertisers benefit too. They realize a higher impact in a less cluttered environment while also building brand trust. It’s a win-win across the ecosystem.

“In the ad tech space, we have the unique position of representing the user by giving them control. We see a huge potential in continuing to educate users and publishers about the online value exchange and how ad filtering can be beneficial to the ecosystem at large. We’re looking forward to more solutions that allow users to exercise choice and control over how and which publishers to support in a simplified way. Ads are a great way to keep the internet free but user-centricity has to be at the forefront when implementing,” Wittek says. 

The post Putting Users in the Driver’s Seat: How Ad Filtering Increases Revenue appeared first on AdMonsters.

In fact, a recent study conducted by Blockthrough iterates that ad-blocking on desktops is close to its all-time high from 2018. As of now, ad blocking has 290 million global users. 

Marty Krátký-Katz, CEO and Founder of Blockthrough, suggests that alongside the desire to have an uninterrupted user experience, internet users thought the quality of ads either declined or stayed stagnant. In the 2021 report, they surveyed over 5,000 people and 67% agreed with this sentiment. 

“Despite the progress made by initiatives like the Better Ads Standard, the perceived benefits of a cleaner ad experience don’t seem to have trickled down to end users — and as long as that doesn’t change, we will continue to see growth in ad-blocking,” says Krátký-Katz.

So how do publishers reach their ad-blocked audience?  

According to the study, acceptable ads are the way to go. The beauty of acceptable ads is the medium allows the end user to curate their ad experience. Regulated by the Acceptable Ads Committee, it defines a lighter ad experience that is appreciated by at least 65% of surveyed adblock users. 

“Acceptable Ads is the only ad specifications standard where end users have a seat at the table and can contribute their opinion on the types of experiences that are perceived to be “acceptable” vs. those that aren’t,” says Krátký-Katz. 

Based on Blockthrough’s data, Acceptable Ads now have an over 95% average opt-in rate from users of browsers and extensions. By the end of 2021, a total of 216M adblock users were opted into Acceptable Ads. 

For the third year in a row, Blockthrough analyzed adblock monetization strategies used by the top 100 US Publishers in the United States. Research showed that at least 62% of publishers affected by ad-blocking were implementing at least one adblock monetization strategy.

In addition, most of these publishers appear to deem acceptable ads as the most effective strategy. The slide asserts that US publishers have “embraced the Acceptable Ads ecosystem as the most reliable and sustainable means to monetize their ad-blocking and ad-filtering audience.” 

Krátký-Katz postures the effectiveness of Acceptable Ads. He maintains that a publisher switching from an adblock wall will go from converting 10-20% of their adblock users to monetizing close to 80% of their adblock users.

“I think the most important takeaway from our research is this: You cannot engage adblock users in good faith by putting further roadblocks and interruptions in their browsing journey,” says Krátký-Katz. “It’s just not sustainable. Unless your monetization strategy is subscription-driven, publishers should resist the tendency to use their content as a bargaining chip to get users to turn off their adblockers.”

To download the full report, click here.

The post Rise of Acceptable Ads Could Be Downfall of Ad-blocking appeared first on AdMonsters.

This often drives publishers to write off ad-blocking audiences as lost traffic. But provided with the right incentives, like less intrusive or more engaging ads, or the ability to pay cash for content—and with the value exchange clearly communicated—those users can be turned into revenue opportunities.

So now that we know why people are using ad blockers, what should be a publisher’s next steps?

A Change Will Do You Good

Yes, ads are a source of revenue, but it’s time to toe the line between maintaining a solid revenue stream and listening to consumer needs.

Improve the user experience. Look at your data. How long are people staying on your site? What makes them leave? 

Take a look at how and where ads are running on your site through a consumers’ lens. Did the webpage take long to load; did a video automatically play with the sound on; was it challenging to sift through actual content due to ad overload. Answer these questions both from a desktop and mobile perspective — and don’t forget to test the user experience from the different devices and browsers that the data tells you your audience is using.

The definition of intrusive ads varies by person, except when it comes to autoplay videos with sound on. That’s a universal no-no. Remove sound and automation from creative; loud and shiny ad formats, too. Don’t place ads in the middle of content; keep the flow noninterruptive, sans distraction. 

Cookies are going away, leaving room for shoppable units as an option. Research possibilities to see what potentially fits best within your website. Shoppable ads will play a weighty part in the future of acceptable advertising. Get ahead of the trend and remember that while ads are changing, it doesn’t mean how people feel about ads will. Tread lightly.

Publishers need to take stock and look at the part of their website they are not addressing. If your website’s take on advertising remains the same, you continue to alienate potential users by ignoring their feedback. 

Ensure that user consent is above board and straightforward implementation. Don’t store data for the purpose of user segmentation. Not collecting intrusive data won’t offer targeting and segmentation like a typical ad exchange.

Getting Around the 800 Pound Ad Filterer in the Room

It can become more than a full-time job for publishers to find ways to get around ad blockers. If publishers do find a way to circumvent ad blockers, chances are they will get blocked again — a frustrating cycle for publishers. There’s no need to play cat and mouse with adblockers to get ads through.

Don’t try to recover what’s lost, instead offer advertisers incremental audience, incremental traffic, and ad impressions.

Whitelist your website. When ad filterers visit your site, they will be prompted with two options: Allow ads to be shown for access to additional free content (think extra free articles above the standard amount) or charge a flat price to view ad-free content.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Work with an ad blocker that helps publishers monetize ad blocked inventory.

Twitter, for example, recently purchased Scroll, a company that offers ad-free viewing, for a monthly fee, to news sites like Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast. Publishers benefiting financially from a partnership with an ad blocker? Be on the lookout for similar convergences.

In addition, paywalls and native ads are often used in an effort to monetize the ad filterer audience. 

Have “the Talk” about Data

Educate consumers about ad blockers. If the average consumer is at all concerned about their online data — what’s collected, analyzed, and sold to the highest bidder — they should know that not all ad blockers are created equal. While many consumers use ad blockers because of concerns about viruses and bugs, some ad blockers may contain malicious hardware and some may be collecting user data without consent.

What becomes the priority to consumers: Avoiding cumbersome ads or having personal data collected, without knowledge, by ad blocking software? Or worse, having an ad blocker upload malware and collect personal data like IP address, country, OS details, time spent, timestamps for web requests, and other URLs clicked on a web page?

Publishers and consumers need to work together to come as close to a happy medium as possible. Publishers stay in business thanks to a revenue stream called advertising. Every publisher (and advertiser) can go overboard with their creative now and then. 

Consumers must acknowledge that free access to content on the open web comes with a price: advertising. In between a too much or nothing at all mentality is an upside-down world where each side collaborates and offers feedback and options that are mutually beneficial to both publisher and consumer. The question is how long will it take to get there.

The post Best Practices For Publisher Survival In An Ad Blocking World appeared first on AdMonsters.

So what’s prompting users — and there are hundreds of millions — to install ad blockers?

A new study released by AAX: Why Block Ads? Behind User Reasons and Motivations, sifted through years of data on internet behavior collected by GlobalWebIndex (GWI). The goal? Getting to know more about ad filterers, a large demo defined by GWI as “selective ad-blocking users” a.k.a. folks who have installed ad blockers but also allow ads to be served. 

An Inconvenient Truth

Anything that disrupts a user’s experience is a top reason people use ad blockers. And, annoying ads even trump privacy concerns. Sixty percent of people use ad blockers to prohibit seeing irrelevant and annoying ads while 47% use them to protect their devices from viruses or bugs potentially embedded in ads.

Forty-six percent of ad filterers find online ads way too intrusive; 43% want to speed up page load; 37% complain ads take up too much screen time and interrupt their experience, and 36% admit to avoiding video ads that appear before watching clips and/or TV shows. When a new episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale” drops, every second counts.

Surprisingly, data collection and overall privacy are lower-level concerns with only 29.8% of ad filterers blocking personalized ads from their browsing history.

At the end of the day, people care more about being inconvenienced by oversized ads than if their data is being collected and what companies are doing with it. 

Don’t Mess With My Data Plan

One might wager that despite how minimally concerned ad filterers were about their privacy in 2020 — a year when the ad tech ecosystem was challenged by privacy regulations and big tech privacy platform changes — they must’ve cared even less in 2017. 

In reality, concern for privacy was higher in 2017, but not by much; interest went from 29.1% down to 28.9% in 2020. In fact, every concern and motivation behind using ad blockers in 2020 declined except one: the data plan. Users are so concerned about maxing out their allotted monthly data that utilization for ad blockers jumped from 16.2% in 2017 to 18.7% in 2020.

No Matter the Age, Ads Are Annoying

It seems a no-brainer to assume Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z would have varying reasons for installing ad blockers. We know what happens when we assume; data found that each group overwhelmingly used ad blockers because too many ads are annoying or irrelevant.

Out of the five reasons to use ad blockers — ads are too intrusive; ads sometimes contain viruses or bugs; there are too many ads on the internet; to speed up page loading times; too many ads are annoying or irrelevant — Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z priorities were identical. These demos ranked too many ads are annoying or irrelevant first, followed by too many ads on the internet; ads sometimes contain viruses or bugs; ads are too intrusive and to speed up page load times.

Boomers strayed from the course, placing less priority on ads containing viruses and page-load time than on the number of ads and their irrelevance.

He Said, She Said

While both men and women equally agree that there are too many ads on the internet, men are more apt to use blockers in an effort to speed up page load times and remove intrusive ads while women are blocking ads to protect their devices from viruses and to eliminate annoying and irrelevant ads.

Education-wise, many ad filterers have postgraduate degrees and above. Overall, the survey received more participation from those with high school education, but the reasons for ad-block usage didn’t vary that widely from an education standpoint.

For example, 45.6% of high school graduates use adblockers to remove intrusive ads compared to 46.8% of college graduates and 44.4% postgraduates.

Postgraduates are less concerned about viruses and bugs in ads — 40.9% —compared to high school and college grads at 49.5% and 45.3% respectively. 

COVID-19 softened some user perceptions like the irrelevance of ads (from 59.3% to 57%) and their intrusiveness (from 47.7% to 44.4%) between the end of 2019 and the third quarter of 2020, but one area ad filterers did not get soft about is avoiding ads. 

During the same time frame, filterers increased fervor for avoiding all ads everywhere, from TV to online from 33.3% to 34.1%. Not a significant hike, but it’s the only category that saw an increase during the pandemic.

Finding the Balance

What does this mean for publishers? Maybe it’s time to revisit how many ads run in your newsletters and on your website. Retest how they look on both desktops and mobile devices. Don’t allow ads to start playing the moment someone visits your site. Maybe it’s time for a website reorganization so visitors won’t feel that content is overtaken by advertising.

For advertisers, think less is more. What’s attention-grabbing and clever to you might be loud and obnoxious to potential consumers. Rethinking your creative strategy might mean the difference between a sale and never being seen. 

For both publishers and advertisers: think like a customer! What would you like to see and not see? How many ads could you tolerate throughout your own user experience?

Instead of thinking about ad blocking as a problem, start thinking about how you can better engage this audience. While a massive number of people block ads, up to 90% of those are ad filterers — choosing to only see acceptable ads. What does this mean? This is a savvy audience, they get that in exchange for free content, they’re going to be shown some advertising so that publishers can pay the bills. 

Just remember: ad filterers don’t hate ads, they just don’t like invasive or irrelevant ads.

The post AAX Study Breaks Down Who Uses Ad Blockers the Most and Why appeared first on AdMonsters.

The surge in digital media consumption continues. Ad spend is flowing freely beside the traffic stream. But unfortunately, to the dismay of publishers and advertisers alike, ad block usage is on the rise. 

And you’re probably thinking that the majority of people blocking ads flat out hate them — sheesh, that’s a lot of lost traffic running like water under the bridge. But your ruminations couldn’t be further from the truth. Truth is, people install ad blockers because they want to filter out annoying, intrusive ads. 

This brings us to another major consumer behavioral shift that started trending ever since we entered the pandemic era: ad blockers are becoming ad filterers — the 95% of all ad-blocking users who have an ad blocker installed but still consent to be served ads. 

This affluent, well-educated, highly engaged audience understands the value exchange of the open web — that the user experience can be enhanced by personalized advertising, that is noninvasive, and often “Acceptable Ads.” Given this group’s high purchase intent, there are endless commerce opportunities just waiting for publishers to leverage them. Considering ad-blocking users can average up to 15% of publisher’s traffic, that’s untapped revenue you really don’t want to miss.

Back in November, we learned that ad filterers are passionate media consumers, who are curious and intrigued by novelty. Not only do they spend a lot of time online, but they also tend to devote a lot of their free time to gaming. They engage with brands on social media, and surprisingly make purchases based upon ads they encounter online. Nope, they don’t find personalized advertising creepy at all.

But before you dash off and start brainstorming monetization strategies, you might want to gain a better understanding of these ad filterers. Maybe it’s time we consult AAX’s latest study: Why Block Ads? Behind User Reasons and Motivations.

What Makes Them Tick?

Once upon a time, I worked as a strategist at an advertising agency. And before coming up with the big idea to pitch to the client we had to gain an informed understanding of the intended audience. Researching the target audience thoroughly ultimately led to a breakthrough insight. Something strategist Mark Pollard calls unspoken human truths. 

So let’s dig deeper into the ad filterers’ mindset, way down deep into what makes them tick and how their motivations have changed over time.

Historically, the primary reason folks found ads annoying was that they were too intrusive or there were just too many ads on the internet. But since the pandemic, the reasons have become a little more nuanced: “I try to avoid all ads wherever, whether on TV or online.” Or, perhaps, “To avoid having to see video ads before watching clips/shows.” 

When comparing people’s overall motivations between 2017 and 202o, the study found: 61.3% of people said they blocked ads because “Too many ads on the internet are annoying or irrelevant” back in 2017, compared to only 57% in 2020.

And while ad filterers want to avoid ads that are personalized based upon their browsing history, the issue of ad irrelevance remains paramount. Far more than viruses, bugs, or their privacy being compromised; ad filterers block ads because they’re being served too many ads that have nothing to do with their interests.  

The insight: Ad filterers aren’t against advertising, they’re just against ads that serve them no purpose.

The Problem With Ad Fatigue

Since the pandemic, streaming media — buoyed by OTT, CTV, and digital audio — is booming. Unfortunately, these increases in streaming media consumption, along with the precise targeting ability of streaming platforms, can lead to something known as ad fatigue — when viewers are often shown the same ad, over and over again. This is one of those instances where the user experience becomes totally annoying, and it’s a key reason that people want to block ads. 

Frequency capping, setting a frequency to manage the number of impressions, is one way to handle this. But frequency without context is a major problem. 

As the third-party cookie starts to crumble and context rises up once more, publishers have the advantage of utilizing their first-party data to tie advertising to their audiences’ interests, actions, and behaviors. 

But wouldn’t it be more prudent to let the user decide?

Consumer’s Choice

For some large-sized publishers, it might make sense to put up a paywall to recoup lost advertising revenue. But since ad filterers are such a savvy audience, in many cases, interruptive paywalls are going to be just as annoying as irrelevant, intrusive advertising. 

Maybe publishers should consider a happy medium, one that offers consumers a little more control. Eighty-three percent of ad-blocking users say they’re happy to see ads that respect their experience.  

When a publisher doesn’t overload a user with ads and offers them the option to allow or accept ads, that meet certain standards: 1/ aren’t intrusive or annoying, 2/ are respectful and don’t interfere with content,  3/ and are clearly labeled with the word “advertisement,” — it makes the value exchange clear and puts the user in the driver seat. 

The times they are a changing, but one thing remains constant, people are going to continue to block ads. Wouldn’t you rather engage them based on their motivations than strictly on your monetization goals?

The post The State of Ad Filtering in 2021 appeared first on AdMonsters.

Ad-blocking users are too often written off as “lost traffic” when studies show they can help revenue efforts when given the right incentives—anything from less intrusive advertising to the ability to pay cash for content. Considering ad-blocking users can average 15% of traffic, that’s potential revenue you should start capturing immediately.

Before our webinar with the Acceptable Ads Exchange (AAX), The Revenue Boost You Could Use Right Now—Ad-Blocker Traffic (watch the replay!), on April 30, @1PM, I had a conversation with CEO Frederick Leuschner. We talked about the importance of publishers not resorting to bad practices to mitigate revenue losses, why he recommends that publishers should not use a whitelisting solution and whether the death of the third-party tracking cookie will cause the number of ad-blocking users to rise.

Gavin Dunaway: With the pandemic hitting revenue efforts hard, do you expect to see many publishers revert to bad habits—slapping as much inventory as possible on pages and letting in overly intrusive formats? (Will IBV make a comeback?)

Frederick Leuschner: Yes. Reports across the industry are sobering, showing CPMs across multiple verticals and geos in firm, downward trend. And, generally speaking, a publisher’s most immediate recourse and mitigation strategy is to free up more sellable inventory and place additional ad slots on a page. But this strategy can have significant negative consequences for user experience.

In fact, publishers trying to place additional ad slots could prompt the ultimate adverse reaction from users: an increase in ad blocking. We recently published a study based on data, compiled by GlobalWebIndex (GWI), that examined ad blocking behavior. According to the GWI, the #1 most common reason for installing an ad blocker is the presence of “too many ads”—a direct result of the knee-jerk reaction to finding more inventory. (The second- and third- most cited reason for ad blocking? “Annoying/irrelevant” and “intrusive” ads.)

We can’t answer the question of IBVs, since we’re exclusively serving ad creative compliant with the criteria set forth by the Acceptable Ads Committee.

GD: A recent study, co-authored by scholars at the New Jersey Institute of Technology working with Forbes, predicted how ad blocking users respond to white-listing requests. What did the AAX team find most interesting about the research, and why do you think publishers might want to take a look at it?

FL: If we had to pick only one reason we were fascinated by this study, it would be the quote “we do not recommend the Wall [white-listing] strategy to publishers unless they have a large portion of loyal users.”

This ties directly into the reason that this should be recommended reading for all publishers: the study shows exactly why it’s not recommendable for a publisher to use a whitelisting solution unless they have highly unique, sticky content and a phenomenally loyal user base. To sum it up: whitelisting works for a very small percentage of publishers.

If a publisher is lacking that super-loyal user base, whitelisting is shown to work against the publisher. The study puts it best: “For low-engaged users, the Wall strategy has a large negative effect on pageviews […] since the majority of users are low-engaged users, the revenue of the publisher is expected to suffer a lot when using the Wall strategy.”

The study compares whitelisting to the Acceptable Ads strategy, and it’s clear that Acceptable Ads have much less of a disturbing effect on user engagement. This is one of the reasons that Acceptable Ads is the best way forward for all members of the value exchange: publishers, advertisers, and users.

GD: The 3rd-party cookie is on its way out. Since that has driven so much targeted advertising, will consumers now be less likely to install an ad blocker?

FL: That’s doubtful. Historically, people have installed ad blockers because they want to filter out ad formats they find intrusive. People were more concerned about too many ads and too many annoying ads—the data shows that stopping tracking wasn’t a primary concern.

Multiple reports, including our recently-published study based on GlobalWebIndex findings and one from the IAB, have confirmed that blocking 3rd-party trackers is only a tertiary cause for the adoption of ad blocking.

We expect people to continue to fall into three different categories: those who want to block all ads, those who want to filter ads through Acceptable Ads (these are the vast majority), and those who want to follow the recommendations of the Coalition for Better Ads (called Better Ads Standard), for whom only a small subset of ads are seen as distracting or intrusive

To learn more about the various approaches to re-engaging your ad-blocker traffic—the highly active, tech-savvy and educated audience—while also examining what we can learn from ad blocking user behavior in building more user-friendly ad products and sustainable monetization strategies for a new digital media age, watch the replay of our AdMonsters Webinar: The Revenue Boost You Could Use Right Now in partnership with AAX.

The post Understanding Your Ad-Blocking Audience: A Conversation With Frederick Leuschner, AAX CEO appeared first on AdMonsters.

In fact, according to Informa Group, publishers stand to lose $35b by 2020 if the ad blocking conundrum isn’t solved.

When you couple the fact that people don’t like intrusive or slow-loading ads messing up their browsing experience, with the fact that more people are relocating their web surfing activities to their mobile devices—and you look at those factors under a microscope—you come up with some really interesting insights about the state of ad blocking in 2020.

The battle against ad blocking has gone full-on mobile.

Lest you fret—it’s not all doom and gloom.

While there are myriad ways to monetize ad blocked traffic, the best solution going is simply making and serving better ads. AdMonsters spoke with Marty Krátký-Katz, Co-Founder & CEO of ad-block monetization platform Blockthrough, about the findings from his company’s new 2020 PageFair Adblock Report and how publishers should best wage war against this monumental obstacle.

(Interview after the graphic.)

Lynne d Johnson: Ad blocking on desktop reached its height around 2016, 2017 and then sort of fell off a bit—or perhaps, simply leveled out.  So does your report confirm that as mobile eclipsed desktop usage, ad blocking has followed suit?

Marty Krátký-Katz, CEO & Co-Founder, Blockthrough

Marty Krátký-Katz: There are a few factors that go into the decline of ad blocking as measured in our report. One is that ad blocking has become more diverse. Classically desktop ad blockers were using extensions like Adblock or Adblock Plus on Chrome or some other browser. Our methodology can capture that easily. But now people are adopting different types of ad blockers—you can now block ads through a VPN and through hardware devices. That’s much harder to measure, so there’s a bit of dark matter if you will.

The second piece is that people are generally using their desktop computers less and less. They’re sort of becoming work or gaming devices and most people’s browsing happens on mobile now. So as people use desktop devices less, our methodology captures that as a decline in the number of devices using ad blocking.

LdJ: Hasn’t Google been doing some work in the battle against ad blocking?

MKK: Yes, Google has taken some steps to make ad blocking harder on both desktop and mobile. So they’re adding more friction to that process of users becoming ad blockers. And I think a really major factor in the decline in desktop is the Coalition for Better Ads, which Google is a part of, along with Microsoft and many other industry stakeholders. They have done some great work in terms of cleaning up the ad experience on the regular Web. This has been a great initiative, but for many ad-block users, it’s still not enough. And that’s why this problem still exists.

Google has said that if a publisher’s ad experience does not comply with better ads they will get penalized by the browser. My understanding is that Google will block most, if not all, the ads for any publisher who doesn’t comply. I think most people have complied because of that.

Editor’s note: Starting August 5, 2020, Chrome will start blocking intrusive video ads in short-form videos in line with the Coalition for Better Ads new standard for short-form video for desktop, mobile web and in-app. Yes, that means even if it’s YouTube.

LdJ: So how are publishers dealing with this?

MKK: Five years ago publishers were just trying whatever any vendor came up with if it sounded like it made sense on the surface. And what we’re seeing now in the industry is everyone starting to realize that the best method is really Acceptable Ads.

It takes into account that while some people want to block ads, a strong majority—80-90%—are actually ok with some light advertising. How do we get these people on something so publishers can make money and users are ok with it and have the ability to opt out. And for the users who don’t want to see any ads they have the option with Acceptable Ads to opt out completely.

We’re 100% focused on Acceptable Ads and being able to monetize Acceptable Ads as well as possible—maximizing monetization while keeping the user experience at a threshold that users are willing to accept. Users would rather you serve them a really light ad experience than an interruptive pop up that says: “Please turn off your ad blocker. Please support us.”

We’ve seen an independent ecosystem emerge where a strong majority of publishers (or the walled gardens) are no longer working directly with the ad-blockers, they’re working with a third party to monetize their ad-blocking audience.  It’s the best solution for the user and will result in the best revenue for the publisher and I think the data we’ve collected in this report validates that hypothesis.

Editor’s note: According to the Blockthrough report, 49% of the top 100 U.S. publishers are using Acceptable Ads to monetize their ad-blocking audience.

LdJ: How will the disappearing cookie impact ad-block recovery efforts?

MKK: A lot of users that are allowing Acceptable Ads are already blocking third-party cookies or any kind of behavioral tracking, so the cookie footprint for these users is actually lower on average than non-ad-blocking users,

We’re stipulating that this seismic shift would negatively impact monetization for regular traffic, but that would basically spread the ad spend across everything else. Our hypothesis and we’ve discussed this with Ari Paparo, who is an advisor of ours and the resident expert on the cookiepocalypse, monetization for our publisher partners should go up while everything else goes down and the spread sort of evening out across everybody. Or it should stay the same, but it shouldn’t be impacted negatively.

Here are some fascinating stats from the 2020 PageFair Adblock Report report:

• 764M global devices were blocking ads at Year-End 2019
• 527M people were using mobile browsers that block ads by default
• 236M people were blocking ads on desktop
• Mobile adblock browsers had grown by 64% since the December 2016
• 69% of global adblocking is on mobile

The post Battling the Rising Mobile Ad Blockers: Q&A With Blockthrough’s CEO Marty Krátký-Katz appeared first on AdMonsters.