Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums

> I personally loathe advertising.

I've always had issues with the constant brain-washing with trivial rubbish, stupid humour and idiotic themes so often used in TV commericals. I tend to download movies/television now, or buy them on DVD, and so I hardly ever watch television per se. When I do, I find it jarring to be taken out of a story to be told about lavatory cleaner or some novelty foodstuff. I have the same feeling when browsing without AdBlock. How am I supposed to read the article with so much stuff dancing around my peripheral vision? Oh, I'm not, it's the ads which are the important thing.

In terms of practical effects, I find I am far less materialistic than many people I know, and less likely to buy things for the sake of it. I think this is because constantly being told you want a new car or consumer electronics will inevitably cause you to believe it. I don't mean this to be rude, btw - it's just how advertising works. Constant repetition combined with all the tricks of the trade like social proof, limited offers, etc.

They also need to stop toying around with amateur designs at the expense of the whole AdSense programme:

http://adsense.blogspot.se/2014/05/a-new-look-for-text-ads-o...

I've seen the past works of the designers on the AdSense team and I'm not impressed. Plus it's quite naive to think that one design will fit all websites. Why can't AdSense, like other ad and affiliate networks, just open up an API so publishers themselves can be in charge of how their ads look and behave?

I think this is based on adsense partner network earnings, which is a small section of the total online advertising market. I don't think you can reach conclusions about online advertising in general (which is all affected by adblocking) from this.

Adblock may be playing a role, but I don't think that's what this data shows.

Several reasons:

_ 1 the centralization of the web. Adsense was built for the long tail web. Today's web is much more centralized with more impressions going to fewer, bigger sites. Google themselves play a few roles here. They run some of the big sites sucking up the traffic. Their search results are increasingly directing people to the big sites.

Fewer blogs more circles and tweets.

The data cited is from Google's quarterly results. Taken as a whole the data seems to support this theory.

  Q1-2014 'Sites Revenues' : $10.47 billion, a 21% increase over Q1-2013
  Q1-2014 'Partner Revenues' : $3.40  billion, a 4% increase over Q1-2013

  Q1-2013 'Sites Revenues' : $8.64 billion, a 18% increase over Q1-2012
  Q1-2013 'Partner Revenues' : $3.26 billion billion, a 12% increase over Q1-2012
 4% increase in Network Revenues.  

Overall, the growth in ad revenue actually accelerated from 19% to 22%. The growth just shifted from the partner network to Google's own network. Both are similarly affected by adblocking. There isn't an overall slowdown.

- 2. The market adsense ads are a part of is competitive, much more so than search.

For search ads, Google's reach, platform quality and ad quality is best by far. There is no competition. For content network ads, Google's inventory (the sites displaying adsense ads) and the platform is nothing special.

Competition is growing. Social media (including Google's own sites) advertising is the biggest new source of competition. In-app ads are anther. Those 'you might also like' content recommendation ads you might find on news sites on are another source are another growing segment 9and an important way of picking up that one weird trick for flatter bellies).

Facebook is the real elephant in this room. Facebook ads work. The platform is improving and marketers are learning how to use it. They have an enormous inventory. They have user data enabling really powerful (or scary, depending on your perspective) targeting. Since so many Facebook users check in multiple times per day, campaigns can target (and report on) daily impressions and such.

Facebook ads work in ways other ads don't. A lot of ad dollars are flowing into Facebook, some would have gone to adsense.

_ 3 "content network" ads on adsense are in the more direct competition for ad dollars with the offline world than most online ads. This is a volatile market segment. Blue chip advertisers can cut 7-8 figure budgets to zero in a bad year (like 2011). On a smaller scale, it's still a volatile market

I'm not saying that adblocking doesn't matter. I'm sure it does. But these are two noisy datasets you are looking at. You need to correlate different things to make this point. Maybe earning per 1m pageviews for some site.

The online ad market is growing 25% YoY despite ad blocking. It used to be that large sites were filling their unsold inventory with AdSense, but not anymore. Ad exchanges like AppNexus and Google AdX are performing much better, with the benefit of an open environment (vs adsense blackbox).

Pagefair is basically "Clean ads as a service." If they detect your using Adblock plus, they'll server you an ad, adblock plus won't block, because they pay adblock plus. (And because they claim to follow adblock plus's policy of 'good ads').

Which is annoying, because if you aren't using adblock plus, you don't get decent ads (just the standard ads), so ultimately it defeats the goal of adblock which is to make all ads non-obtrusive, for all users, not just the chosen few who use adblock.

Adblock edge will block pagefair ads, because adblock edge is a not-for-profit adblocker, unlike adblock plus.

Also hosts blocking remains a completely viable option.