John Whittingdale
gave a speech declaring that adblocking is piracy.
Let’s be honest: there are some people who adamantly refuse advertising. Just refuse. They don’t want to be bothered. It annoys them. It ruins their “user experience,” or whatever other self-involved phrase has been invented. They’ve been skipping ads since the days of the VCR, and they’ll always block them.
But it’s not piracy. If I toss the Sunday inserts in a newspaper without even glancing at them, am I a pirate? If I go to the bathroom during a commercial, am I infringing copyright somehow? If I willfully ignore two pages of ads in the middle of a comic book, have I just stolen the artwork?
The thing is, there is another reason for adblocking: over a decade of bad behavior on the part of advertisers.
Since the early 2000′s when online ads came to fruition, advertisers have displayed a constant disregard for those who would have to see the ads. They sent out Flash ads with malicious code, which helped form the backbone of many botnets and DDOS attacks. They pioneered the autoplay ad, otherwise known as “JESUS CHRIST MY EARS WHICH TAB IS DOING THAT?” They put inappropriate ads everywhere, some borderline NSFW and some just straight up “CALL ME AND FUCK TONIGHT” with tits in your face. They tracked our online behavior, which sites we visited, how long we were there, and compiled that data in big banks that were ripe for hackers and law enforcement alike. When mobile caught on, they didn’t give one red shit on just how much battery life their ads consumed, how much expensive metered data they devoured, how many processing cycles were monopolized.
In short, online ads were a “Lord of the Flies” bonanza. Users fought back: they blocked the ads.
When adblockers started to catch on, panic began to rise. It came to a head not long ago with the release of the first adblocking apps on iOS, Since iPhones and iPads were considered the default consumption device, online media went into a frenzy to declare the impending death of their sites at the hands of mean, nasty, good-for-nothing audiences who wanted everything for free.
It hasn’t happened, but they did a good Chicken Little impression none the less.
But I have one simple solution that will bring back some of those users who blocked ads just to save themselves from the onslaught: clearly state your ad policy on your website.
Are you going to vet your ads so nothing harmful or inappropriate gets through? Say so. Are you going to disallow autoplay, Flash, or anything else that consumes inordinate amounts of data, could be potentially dangerous, or impacts the audience’s system performance? Tell them that. Are you going to do what television, radio and print has done since time immemorial, and take responsibility for the ads your web site shows? Put it in writing.
Audiences don’t block ads solely because they want something for nothing. They don’t trust ad networks and ad providers anymore. That trust was absolutely destroyed during a period where ad networks treated their recipients like garbage. It’s going to have to be rebuilt, bit by bit, by the web sites that show those ads.
“But it’s hard! It takes time! It’s expensive! I can’t control my ad network!”
Sorry, but the onus isn’t on the audience to deal with those things. You helped break it; you’ll have to fix it. You’re going to have to show that you can be trusted to deliver advertising in your site’s content that isn’t going to set my computer on fire, get me fired from an office or violate my privacy. If you can’t do that, then you don’t value your audience.
Calling them “pirates” and stamping your feet isn’t the solution. Rebuilding the relationship with the audience you depend on for your financial well being is.
This is exactly the thing. I mostly don’t block ads. You know where I have a ton of things filtered out? Tumblr. Why? Because tumblr made there be things that flashed and moved constantly on my screen that prevented me from functioning, because I have sensory processing issues. So I can either not use the site at all, or filter out their ads. Those are the only options they’ll give me.
If tumblr had an option for “don’t make ads be animated” and otherwise making them less intrusive, I wouldn’t block them.
yeah tumblr had intrusive ads for a horror movie. that shit was fucking scary! it was a violation, of course we all went scrambling for the ad blockers when this fucking place pulled that shit.
How to End Adblocking
Published
callanswall 