This is another reason why most of the services will shift to apps. Its much harder to stop apps from tracking you or shoving ads in your face.
Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
41–50 of 73 posts
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#42Doesn't Adblock Plus permit google ads by default hence the need for Adblock Edge https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/
Yes-which is a shame. I think that Google has violated the acceptable ad policy and should be removed. Here's an article from when the change was made to Adblock Plus http://gizmodo.com/google-supposedly-paid-off-adblock-plus-t...
Sorry to be that guy, but your use of the hyphon ”-” makes it hard to read your post. A hyphon with no spaces around it joins the two or more words into a single concept. A man-child is a single entity. In your usage here and above, all you need is a space on either side. A "yes-which" first parsed as a typo of "yes-witch", which I supposed would be a witch who agrees a lot. On the other hand, "Yes - which..." Now it is easily parsable as a transition. :)
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#43Every day I hear about sites being broken for people with AdBlock. Yesterday a friend couldn't complete his buy at a online ticket agency due to AdBlock. The problem is that you never know if the site is broken or if it's due to AdBlock and most of the times you don't even realize it (especially true for people who are not power users).
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
We think (@pagefair) it's clear that adblock is being promoted just fine by word of mouth. It's the ad industry that's got to change somehow. We're trying to be part of that. What's shocking to us is how the ad industry mostly doesn't even recognise how fast adblock is growing. To them, it just looks like more people have switched off their PCs, because they just can't see that segment of the audience anymore. Theref…
I'm interested to see how the web business model changes in the next decade. I think it's likely that web advertising is a dead end. There's been a number of articles about how Facebook advertising is a waste of money, ad impressions are down in general, and like this article describes, Adblock is really taking off. I think, and desperately hope, that we're going to see more voluntary subscription type services like…
I used to block ads before we noticed that 30% of our website revenue was lost to adblocking. We realised that people weren't intentionally blocking ads on our site, but probably due to some bad advertising that pushed them over the edge somewhere else on the internet. There was nothing we could do, so started a new business (PageFair).
In your post, you are correctly angry at advertisers. But adblocking doesn't punish advertisers, it punishes websites, starting with your favorite ones. Right now, the advertisers just go somewhere else for their traffic. Even if it did somehow punish advertisers, would it discriminate between the relevant & polite ones (e.g., job ads on stackoverflow) and the spammy ones (magic weight loss pills on dictionary.com)?
Agree that the publishers and web users need something better. That's our goal at PageFair.
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#45How solid are those numbers? 25% sounds like a lot to me for your 'average user' kind of people, who make up the vast bulk of people on the internet. The curve also looks a bit optimistic.
My guess is that they have a script that observes ad placements and counts "non-impressions".
Counting impressions at the site level is not the same as counting them at the ad server level. There are generally multiple ad servers daisy-chained into the ad tag, creating a lot of latency. It is very typical to lose 10% or more ad inventory simply because the ad can't load in time.
If pagefair can't account for that, then the number is highly inflated.
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
We think (@pagefair) it's clear that adblock is being promoted just fine by word of mouth. It's the ad industry that's got to change somehow. We're trying to be part of that. What's shocking to us is how the ad industry mostly doesn't even recognise how fast adblock is growing. To them, it just looks like more people have switched off their PCs, because they just can't see that segment of the audience anymore. Theref…
I'm interested to see how the web business model changes in the next decade. I think it's likely that web advertising is a dead end. There's been a number of articles about how Facebook advertising is a waste of money, ad impressions are down in general, and like this article describes, Adblock is really taking off. I think, and desperately hope, that we're going to see more voluntary subscription type services like…
"But advertisers crossed the line when my phone started talking about construction contractors at me out loud. Instantly switched to Firefox, installed Adblock...."
Bingo. Every time I switch to, or add a browser to the ones I regularly use (this also included a desktop Windows to Linux switch), I forgo Adblock. But I inevitably install it after hitting a seriously abusive ad.
In theory I'm willing to give advertisers a chance, in practice the bad actors have poisoned the well so thoroughly I, and evidently many many others, including ones I influence, or setup and maintain their computers (my parents, who have a fair amount of disposable income), block almost all advertising.
And, yeah, I can't see how this won't end up changing a number of business models.
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#47In your graph captioned "Observed Desktop Adblocking Rate vs Predicted Rate", where does the curve for predicted rate come from? It's not explained in the text. You do not show how much of the decline in ad revenue is caused by adoption of adblock, or even whether the amount of decline attributable to adblock is significant or measurable. You merely point out that revenue has declined and that adblock adoption has in…
Fair points. We need to provide the source data and a full explanation. We're going to publish a detailed report in August with everything in it.
To answer one of your questions, the predicted desktop rate is based on an assumption that adblock adoption is driven by word of mouth (we have a basis for this assumption), and a compound growth rate is fitted to raw adblock rate data.
It's hard to combine the google trends data into the same model, because it's just a picture of search volume, not total adblock installations. I think it would be a fair to assume that the growth rate of new installations would match the growth rate of search volume, which means that the growth rate of 65% we're seeing this year is higher than it would have been in previous years.
Finally, I want to acknowledge that nothing can grow exponentially forever! At some point everyone who will use adblock will already have it installed. I'm pretty sure some countries are pretty close to adblock saturation already (Germany, Poland, Sweden and Finland).
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#48How do I Adblock this pagefair thing?
It's easy. If you ever see one of our ads, you can permanently opt out using the close button. We're working hard not to show the kinds of ads that most adblock users would want to block. We currently have < 1% opt outs.
> We currently have I have a feeling this may be because even "Close Buttons" on ads have a reputation for being untrustworthy.
I've drilled it into the heads of all of my not-so-computer-savvy relatives to NEVER click anything on any ads, even if it looks like a close button. They often aren't. (Telling mom and pop that clicking on 'em will give you viruses is very effective.)
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#49I'm not so fussed about ads I can ignore, but (along with analytics and stuff like social media buttons) - they all add latency to web browsing with extra DNS lookups and HTTP requests. It's especially bad on mobile. So no matter how nice, useful or relevant the advertising is, unless it's hosted on the site I'm visiting, it will probably be blocked.
on mobile, my service provider (free.fr) offers ad block on ISP level. Very nice feature, my only concern is that it is an opt-out choice.
Re: Correlation behind adblock growth surge and AdSense revenue doldrums
#50Every day I hear about sites being broken for people with AdBlock. Yesterday a friend couldn't complete his buy at a online ticket agency due to AdBlock. The problem is that you never know if the site is broken or if it's due to AdBlock and most of the times you don't even realize it (especially true for people who are not power users).
especially true for people who are not power users
This is particularly sad because those people are also the ones who are the most easily misled into getting bitten by ad-originated malware and thus the ones who will derive the most benefit from AdBlock. Power users who know and use AdBlock would be also far less likely to fall for such deception.
There's one decision that is clear when using the Internet: either you can learn enough to be able to take control of your browsing experience, or you can remain complacent and be controlled by the entities who will manipulate you to their satisfaction. I've chosen the former and wish more people would too.
Personally I find that just having JS off by default cuts out a huge amount of the crap on most pages (including ads) and don't need more than that + a HOSTS file to kill off the rest, but this is unfortunately a setup that is probably unusable for the (current) "average user".