How to End the Adblock Arms Race

Everybody hates ads on the Internet. Even advertising and marketing professionals hate ads on the Internet if they’re too intrusive.

So there’s a huge market for adblocking software such as Adblock Plus, which anyone can download for free. Adblock Plus advertises itself with an irresistible line. “Surf the web without annoying ads!”

Who isn’t in the market for that? Anyone? Raise your hand if you like annoying ads on the Internet.

Yeah, we didn’t think so.

Ads are necessary, though, and almost everyone understands why. It’s how online content providers make money. No ads, no money. So content providers are now blocking ad-blocking software.

Forbes magazine, for instance, is current blocking browsers with an ad blocker enabled. Instead of the magazine’s articles, the following message appears on the homepage: “Thank you for visiting Forbes. We noticed that you have an ad blocker enabled. Please disable it, or whitelist Forbes.com, to enter our site and receive an ad-light experience for the next 30 days.”

Forbes if an outstanding magazine. It wouldn’t be able to publish any content at all if it did not pay its writers. That money has to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertising revenue, it will have to come out of your pocket directly if you want to read the magazine.

But everybody hates annoying ads on the Internet, so companies like Adblock Plus will soon figure out how to get around the ad-blocker blockers.

It’s a classic arms race. No side ever wins once and for all, which is one reason why advertising and marketing professionals shouldn’t freak out about it.

The most recent freakout occurred when Apple announced it will allow ad-blocking extensions in its mobile browsers on devices using iOS 9. It’s giving ad-blockers the upper hand temporarily, but the ad-blocker blockers will come up with a workaround soon enough.

The solution here is to figure out how everyone can win, and it should not be that difficult. We should start by identifying the root of the problem. Adblock Plus put its finger on it. Its marketing slogan, again, is “Surf the web without annoying ads!”

The key word in that sentence is annoying. If ads weren’t annoying, no one would go out of their way to block them.

Ads aren’t annoying just because they’re ads. They’re annoying when they pop up and get in your way. They’re annoying when they take so long to load that the website you’re visiting hangs. They’re annoying and creepy when you can tell you’re being tracked everywhere you go on the Internet.

Otherwise, ads are no problem.

“Irritation is a persistent theme in writings about ad blocking,” writes Justin Fox at Bloomberg. “It is often attributed to the way advertisers track consumers across the Internet, clogging up their browsers, invading their privacy and sometimes just creeping them out.”

If none of that were happening, we’d be having an entirely different conversation about adblocking. We might not be talking about it at all.

Adblock Plus is trying to find a third way. Its creators understand that advertising has its place and a positive role to play in all of our lives, not only because consumers want to know what products and services are available, but also because advertising helps pay for the content we love on the Internet. So Adblock Plus goes ahead and whitelists ads that adhere to strict anti-irritation standards while blacklisting everything else.

Advertising and marketing pro Doc Searls thinks that’s not quite good enough because Adblock Plus makes no distinction between tracking and non-tracking ads. His proposal is a little more detailed and will probably be a lot more effective.

“The simplest way to end to the adblock war,” he writes, “is for non-tracking-based ads — the safe Madison Avenue kind — to carry a marker that ad  blockers can whitelist… I also suggest that ad blockers call themselves adtech blockers, so it’s clear that the user’s problem is with the online equivalent of junk mail, and not with the kind of advertising that has supported commercial media for the duration.”

Will it work? Who knows? But a truce of some kind is probably coming. No one can ever win an arms race, but if we can come up with a formula where advertising pays for content on the web without being annoying, everyone wins.