4 Simple Ways to Mitigate the Increase in Ad Blocking
Ad blocker use can be explained as the product of how annoying ads are and how easy they are to block.. and the recent explosion in ad blocking paints a clear picture of how annoying banners have become and how easy it has become to install content blockers. So here’s some ideas to minimize ad blocking:
1?—?Fewer adjacent placements. The density of adjacent ads required to properly monetize content is part of what makes them so annoying. Imagine what magazines and newspapers would look like without full pages ads (probably something like the web). On TV, you’ll never find ads in the chyron that move hearts and minds, the same goes for ? page print ads. Publishers who use high quality interruptive experiences can do so with a much lower ad load, which makes for a better user experience.
2?—?Fewer, simpler, ad formats. Now that the web has grown up, it’s advertising needs to follow suit. The fact is that every successfully monetized medium uses standardized interruptive advertising and digital needs the same to succeed. We need to stop making 97 (literally) different formats and build and focus on a limited number of easy to use, standard, high-impact ad types.
3?—?Ad quality matters. There are a growing number of tools available to measure engagement and dwell time, like Moat (who we’re partial to at Sled), Chartbeat and IAS. Publishers should use these tools to measure engagement and favor higher quality creative in their ad serving decisions. The more engaging ads are, the less likely readers are to install ad blockers.
4?—?Make it inconvenient to block ads. Commercial options for publishers to make ad blocking less convenient, like Sourcepoint or PageFair offer various alternative monetization schemes. The simplest solution is to just ask people to disable their ad blocker in order to see content. In some of the first numbers I’ve seen on the subject, 44% of readers turned off their ad blocker to access Fortune content. Maybe this is what Google should have done instead of yielding to Eyeo’s demands for cash payment. One has to wonder how many more ad blockers would be disabled if Google required it.
The current rise in ad blocking can be managed with a mixture of common sense, learning from successfully monetized mediums of the past and bringing ad quality data to bear on ad serving decisions.