If you’ve been following discussions in the advertising world lately, you’ve probably heard a lot about ad blockers. They are clever little plugins that let you avoid seeing ads, make sites like Aftonbladet load in under five seconds, and cause newspapers to struggle financially.
An ad blocker has several interesting effects. Whether they are positive or negative is not something we will take a stance on, but they affect more than what is immediately obvious. To begin with, an ad blocker is a browser plugin designed to prevent ads from being displayed. It usually does this by simply blocking certain types of content. This can be as simple as content from specific sources or content with certain names.
An example of a popular ad blocker is ABP. I won’t vouch for it being safe, working well, or anything else of that nature — but it does exist.
What does this mean for newspapers?
Since most daily newspapers have started losing significant amounts of money on their model of delivering paper filled with ads to people’s homes, they have quickly adopted another model. They now display websites packed with ads. Because few people are actually interested in these ads, many choose to block them using an ad blocker. As much as one third of all ad impressions in Sweden are blocked this way.
Depending on how meticulous publishers are, they may or may not choose to disclose this to advertisers. What is clear, however, is that the “reach” media outlets boast about when selling advertising has been severely reduced. One third of users see NO ads at all. Already shaken advertising publishers, who were forced to leave the safe paper world where results could not be measured in favor of selling unmeasurable online results, naturally take a hit from this. The more ad blockers that exist, the harder it becomes for them to make money.
Since a large portion of the content on some of our major newspaper websites consists of ads, this also leads to another interesting side effect. Suddenly, these sites load reasonably well even on slower connections. Unlike declining revenues, this should probably be seen as a win for their development teams. They have been handed a solution to the problem of being the slowest sites in the country.
Some ads are shown — or can be whitelisted
There are ads, and then there are ads. Google’s ads in search results are often displayed even with ad blockers enabled — either because they are not blocked, because you have disabled the function, or simply because money has changed hands. Google is today one of the world’s largest — if not the largest — advertising publishers, but they have succeeded in something that at least Swedish daily newspapers have failed to do, or completely ignored. They have succeeded with relevance.
The ads Google shows are relevant — or at least somewhat relevant. Daily newspapers, on the other hand, have chosen to ignore this, which results in you seeing ads for a Tomas Ledin concert even though he is completely useless. If you happen to think he is fantastic, you can be fairly certain you’ll instead see ads for Ace of Base.
Our active choice to filter out irrelevant ads or ads from publishers who do not understand relevance leads to another consequence. Marketing budgets have to move. In short, the world looks like this:
- No one watches TV
- No one listens to the radio
- No one reads the newspaper
- No one sees online ads
If you invest marketing money in any of these, you need to consider where people actually pay attention. What do people really listen to?
The simple solution is to replace push with pull. Stop forcing information on people they are not interested in, and instead be present when they actually are interested. Create things they care about and make sure they are available exactly when they matter. Besides ads in search results, there is of course another channel — one we as an SEO agency can hardly avoid mentioning — there are organic search results too.
It might even be a good thing…
Many people in the advertising industry — whether they publish, produce, or whatever it is they do — are understandably upset and discouraged. I actually believe this might even be good for them. It will be something of a trial by fire, but some will learn to show you things you are genuinely interested in. Instead of pushing detergent ads while you want to watch the news, maybe they will eventually learn to mention them when you are about to do laundry and have run out.
