To block or not to block?
Here’s an interesting article about the consequences of adblocking software (check the comments for further discussion).
I wrote a post at the start of the year that explored some of this topic, and if you check out the comments beneath the Guardian article you’ll note many complaints about the quality and tone of the ads that fill up the sites you really want to see, while also sucking up their bandwidth:
kooljeff says:
Indeed. If they were discreet, tasteful and unobtrusive letting the content take precedence that would be fine.
But we are bombarded by garish, tasteless overwhelming greed. Continually punched and kicked with corporate grasping, money grubbing. No wonder the Tories like it so much.
This has led to last year’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning ‘Unskippable ads’ from Geico:
Which has since been followed up by this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLwTsyIROsacim24vPVm-6Vf_P5AtfvMk9&v=DgCHUHgNnZI
Funny, isn’t it? There’s this huge smelly problem in the world of advertising and, aside from the odd pisstake, the entire industry seems happy to ignore it. As far as I can tell, websites seem to think it’s better to annoy you by following you around the net with a picture of that lampshade you decided not to buy (or, even stranger, more lampshades when you’ve just bought one: ‘He seems to be a great lover of lampshades. He must want more and more of them. Let’s shove them all under his nose!’) than simply acknowledge that you’ve spent time on their site already, and perhaps that’s enough for now. The analogy of being chased out of the shop and followed all over the place by the shop keeper makes total sense, but why does no one acknowledge that? Is this method of salesmanship so damn effective that it’s worth all the bad blood?
That brings us on to adblockers. Another comment from the Guardian article:
7heManFromDelMonte (ironic name?) says:
He needs to ask WHY people are using ad- blockers. And the simple answer is that we are sick of being fed ads 24/7.
Tv, radio, social media, busses, taxis, billboards, newsletters. Even on petrol pump handles!
We use ad blockers because we are sick of being force fed ads. Otherwise we wouldn’t use them.
Precisely.
Ad blockers are used because people don’t like some aspect of the ads, be that persistence, ugliness, use of bandwidth, indication of a further corporate greed that they’d rather not enable etc. But instead of addressing those faults, the websites and advertisers have got together and attempted some sort of guilt trip, suggesting that we should bloody well take our medicine because it’s paying for the next Muse album.
I think the angle here should be positive reinforcement; the carrot instead of the stick. To avoid the King Canute-esque whining of Mr. Whittingdale and the media moguls an effort must be made to create things people want. Is that easy? No. Is there currently a better alternative? No. Is any of this really going to change? Hahahhahahahhahahahahhahahhahahahhahahhahahahhahha…
i am no techie but I installed Adblock years ago as an experiment. and every time I see a computer screen with banner ads now I feel i am looking at the past. it’s jarring. advertising just doesn’t belong online. it’s not needed and certainly not welcomed.
I think for all the talk about people hating online ads, it probably goes down to the human instinct of “what’s in it for me?” Even though the argument against ads is strong, there are some contradictions in the complaints if you look closely enough.
I wonder if people (very subconsciously) associate the cost of seeing ads as offsetting the cost of the product. In other words, folks understand that (for example) the local cinema doesn’t just pay for itself. The ads are part of the reason it stays open. And people understand that if advertising means the cinema is still there a year later, and ticket prices are reasonable, then it’s a win-win. You don’t often see a huge swathe of people avoiding the ads before a film too often either, even though they could all easily avoid 100% of them by waiting outside.
In the UK, we have a particularly good view of this paradox. Since so many people apparently dislike ads as much as they say they do, I’d have thought that there would be a strong push for more BBC like media companies with a small contribution to fund them. Yet the BBC model is lambasted on a regular basis because people are “forced” to pay for it. So, people don’t paying to avoid ads, but then don’t want the ads to support the essentially free product either. So which is it?!
Specifically on computers, the problem for the consumer is that just showing up is expensive. In the past, you bought media and then played it on the best device you could afford with the rest of your money. Now you buy the best device you can afford and fill it with free or cheap subscriptions to various media. So anything that comes to the party asking for money on top of that is an annoyance, sadly.
Whether online or off, things cannot be always cheap, always free, always high quality and free of advertising, unless everyone agrees to pay top whack for everything. Would anyone really ever sign up for that though?
To answer your last point, lots of media channels offer more expensive ad-free versions, and many people take them up.
But overall I’m just talking about online ads. I’d argue that the quality of other ads has gone down over the last decade, but it’s the massive irritation of online that seems to annoy people most. Sure, we don’t mind ads in the cinema (although who would stand around outside instead of sitting in their nice comfy seat and talking or playing Angry Birds during the ads?), but that’s because we’re used to them. The level of ‘follow-you-around’ annoyance online is new and therefore it’s made a situation we were happy with worse, so it gets our opprobrium.
And as far as what things can always be, David Abbott once said: ‘Quality is always possible and always under threat’.
What kind of things are you thinking of specifically when you say people pay good money to remove ads? I agree with your points though, it’s just tricky to find a way of raising the bar in terms of quality…
Purely from a technical point of view, it feels like the web as a technology is getting left behind. When it was the thing that everything was built on (10 years ago or so), that coincided with the move of big publishers and newspapers online. There was a lot of money in making and creating the sites and I think that led folks to do things as they are in the offline media world. Since then, the rise in apps give companies and their customers a much more controlled experience. It’s also and easier to make money out of (through in app purchases etc.)
As the cost of creation goes down, so does the budget for design, writers, or for displaying ads. And businesses still want creative industries to go lower in terms of costs. And for me that’s what needs to change. There has to be a way of creating more high quality stuff, that people will ultimately want to pay for both on the client, and the customer side. Perhaps there needs to be an easier way of letting customers pay for stuff than exists right now. There probably needs to be significant resources invested in an ad format that compliments websites where they need to be ad supported.
To answer your first question: Spotify, Apple Music and Hulu.
I’m sure there are others, but those are the big ones I’m aware of, and I assume the ‘ad-free’ financial model is built into the price of Netflix and HBO Go.
I’m with Vinny. I installed them a long time ago and am amazed when i see them on someone else’s screen. Proper woah.
I’m on a relatively new macbook at the moment and my blocked ad count is already at nearly 80,000. Which is insane.
I do go on a lot of football streaming sites which may add more than a few to the count
I’m not sure that people accept ads on TV and cinema because they’re subconsciously aware that it pays for the medium. I don’t think people work like that. People accept TV/cinema and press ads because there have always been TV, cinema and press ads. And we’ve become pretty good at filtering them out without the need for an adblocker. We hate them less because when they interrupt you, as all ads must surely do, you’re in a passive frame of mind. You’re not in the middle of doing something. You’re open to being interrupted. If you were to beam TV ads into people’s bedrooms at night, then they would block those too with ad-proof curtains.
It wouldn’t matter if all the banner ads were as good and simple as the posters of old, because there would be 17 on a page, crammed into aesthetically displeasing spaces and reduced to a wallpaper of jibber jabber.
And yes, TV ads aren’t as good. The budgets have gone because the money is spread over digital and social and webisodes and content. Things have to be done more quickly because that’s what the digital lead times dictate. The creatives who make them are more likely to be media neutral (is there a less creative word in the world than ‘neutral’). So originality and creative strategy is no longer valued. Craft is now the only thing that creatives have, because ideas don’t matter. So awards are just full of shit crafted to within an inch of it’s life masquerading as an idea. With digital, targeting is more important than understanding so planning gets worse. And yet our job remains the same today as it’s always been; to understand humans not technology.
We will not stop being seduced by the possibilities that advertising on the internet promises because it is such a perfect way to reach people. As important as the telephone.
And we’ve never been able to crack doing ads on that either.
If only craft were that good…
Q: What’s in it for me?
A: Nowt.
I use Netflix because the quality of TV is so bad. Not to avoid the adverts. Equally, until the quality of web content declines, there’s nothing in it for me to stop using Adblock.
If companies charge for their content online then we’ll eventually see the same split we have with TV now. Premium vs Free w/ ads. And the free stuff will be shite.
Alternatively, if enough companies keep their content running online for free, other companies will eventually have to follow suit, in which case it becomes just another cost of doing business, like letterheads, premises, et al.