Skip to footer

With ad blocking on the rise, publishers eye a new approach: asking nicely

More users than ever are running ad-blocking software, preventing digital advertisements from loading on the pages they visit. Faced with the prospect of losing ad revenue, some publishers are asking users directly to disable the software.

|
Adblock Plus
The homepage of Adblock Plus, the most popular ad-blocking software, promises to speed up web browsing and protect users' privacy by blocking "intrusive" ads.

It’s no great secret that most commercial online content, including this newspaper, is sustained by advertising. Newspapers and websites generally offer paid digital subscriptions (which usually remove ads and offer other benefits), but circulation rates have been on the decline for years. In order to keep producing content, sites need to make up the shortfall by showing ads to their visitors.

The problem is that even though digital advertising revenues are on the rise, everyone hates online ads.

Many people get creeped out by how much personal data, including browsing and shopping habits, gets shared with advertisers. And there are legitimate privacy concerns about whether online visits can be linked to personally identifiable information such as a home address or a Social Security number.

For many users, the solution is to install an ad-blocker. The software has been around for years, but lately its use has exploded – more than 15 percent of users in the United States use some kind of ad-blocking software, compared with just 8 percent in July 2013, according to Dublin-based media firm PageFair. Ad-blockers prevent digital ads from loading in the headers or sidebars of websites you visit, making Web surfing more speedy and arguably more secure.

Here’s the catch: in many cases, ad-blockers also starve sites of the revenue they need to survive. PageFair estimates that ad-blocking will cost publishers $22 billion in lost revenue in 2015, hitting technology sites and social networks especially hard. Publishers have pushed back in various ways, including disallowing users from viewing their pages altogether if they’re running ad-blockers. But now they’re trying something new: asking politely.

For a while, if you visited Wired.com you’d see a message asking you to “Please do us a solid and disable your ad-blocker.” Visit the Guardian’s website and you’ll be greeted with a banner reading, “We notice you’ve got an ad-blocker switched on. Perhaps you’d like to support the Guardian another way?” and a link to donate to the paper. If you browse Reddit with your ad-blocker disabled, you’ll occasionally see a drawing of a moose in the space where an ad would normally be, with the caption, “Thanks for not using Adblock Plus [the most popular ad-blocking software]. Have a silly moose.”

It’s too early to tell whether publishers’ appeals to users’ mercy will be successful. PageFair says they’re not likely to have an effect, citing a study it performed in which only 0.33 percent of ad-blocking users allowed ads to be shown on sites that asked that ad-blockers be disabled. On the other hand, the New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo argues that “if blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data.” Users say they don’t mind ads that don’t track them, distract them with animations, or cover up the content they’re trying to view.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to With ad blocking on the rise, publishers eye a new approach: asking nicely
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/0820/With-ad-blocking-on-the-rise-publishers-eye-a-new-approach-asking-nicely
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe