Is the Digital Ad Industry in Free Fall? Part 2: The short and long-term fallout for publishers

This is the second in a series about the digital advertising industry. The first post you can read here.

Let’s just get the bad news out of the way: ALL digital publishers are facing a branding issue. Judging by many of the comments from the first piece in this series, and other pieces on LinkedIn, publishers are seen as the scourge and as the last, public-facing link in the production line, the ones who must be punished for bad ads. And ad blockers are seen as saviors in fight to win back people’s time. They are protectors of user experience.

 Some publishers are feeling it more than others. In Europe there have been reports of as much as 40% ad attrition on legacy sites due to ad blocking. Sites that are most at-risk appeal to young, male, tech-savvy consumers. Makes sense younger readers hate ads; they've been exposed to other models. Last Christmas I taped a holiday special for my 3 and 5 year old kids, and they went ballistic when they saw the commercials. It occurred to me: These kids, who prior to then got their content from on-demand services only, had never seen a commercial before. This is the emerging digital audience—ad-repellant.

 Personally, I pay for about 80 percent of my content. But even some of the content I pay for has ads. I’m even OK with that, but one of my commenters from Part 1 of this series made a great point that paying for content or digital service should mean that you have bought the opportunity to not have to see ANY ads.

Many of the most informed media consumers are not necessarily aware of the Sisyphean bargain they are striking by turning on their ad blocker. They are supporting a potentially more sinister alternative, for reasons I’ll get into.

 There are several ways this will shake out for publishers and readers, in the short and longer term:

1. Publishers will simplify and lose weight.

While some publishing execs are in full-blown panic mode and paying Ad Blocker whitelisting fees and pretending like it’s still 2011, many others are systematically identifying the source of consumer hatred and taking it on the chin in the short term for longer-term brand health.

But going deep into site architecture and Roto-Rootering the hairballs impacting user experience takes a while. The digital media company I recently left ran a number of tests last year and identified several ad chain culprits—monetization partners that were weighing down load times. And they did the math to determine the impact that these load times had on the premium ad business. From there, we streamlined. Similarly, many publishers are running audits on their ad units, removing the third-party slowpokes and redesigning their pages to make the content and associated ad experience cleaner.

But for now, we’re still taking it on the chin. Why? As explained recently by Tom Dotan in The Information, who cited a recent eMarketer study, advertising spending on automated exchanges, or programmatic advertising, is only going up. More publisher inventory is being sold this way, and programmatic ad calls are big culprits of data-sucking scripts that weigh down ad load times.

Some publishers have signed up with Google’s AMP program (short for Accelerated Mobile Pages), which automatically filters out heavy experience on mobile devices. Like most things Google develops, AMP could be a defacto standard for user experience moving forward.

 And the standard bearer of our industry, the Internet Advertising Bureau (or IAB) has proposed a new standard for all digital publishers called LEAN (an acronym for Light, Encrypted, Ad Choice Supported, Non-invasive ads). Just as IAB ad standards became best practices in digital ad formats in the late 1990s and 2000s, LEAN will become a defacto definer of “good” user experience moving forward.

2. Users are getting educated, and given choices. 

Even those ad blockers that don’t extort publishers by charging them whitelisting fees attempt to streamline ads according to their standards, and these standards may or may not correspond with a user’s best interests. In the end, some one else is defining your experience. The Libertarian in me prefers to vote with my feet, take my ads unfiltered, and just opt out of sites that don’t provide good experience.

Sites like washingtonpost.com, are taking a different tack--transparency and choice. When their browsers sniff a hit from a consumer with an ad blocker on, a pop-up appears that informs the user that the content they’ve come to expect is available because of advertising and requests that the user disable the ad blocker and opt into an ad-lite experience. In the case of Wired.com, the user is given a choice of disabling the ad blocker and enabling the publication’s ads, or paying up. This approach is still in its early days—no publishers that I am aware of are activating this option across all instances of ad blocking. But anecdotally I’m hearing that a high percentage of audience will turn off their ad blocker for sites that ask.

 It appears that while some of you (as witnessed in the comments of my last piece) don’t want to see any ads ever, many of the folks who use ad blockers are not opposed to advertising; they are opposed to bad, intrusive, data-sucking, malware-ridden, slow-to-load advertising.

Hulu is onto something by enabling three tiers of service: 1. All ads, no fees; 2. reduced ads with a small fee; 3. and no ads for a premium fee. This may be the choice we get across all of our media in the future.

I would swap in option 3.5: You get no ads, but your entire experience is brought to you by Brand X, which you see omnipresently, but unintrusively as the sponsor. Brands don’t pay for ad impressions, but for length of entire user sessions and engagement during that session. This way publishers get paid to do what they are meant to do—develop engaging original content.

3. Consumers will learn how the sausage gets made.

We publishers walk a fine line, defining user experience while also enabling performance for advertisers. In a perfect world, this is one and the same. But our world is hardly perfect.

 Ask any publisher if she wants to sell heavy, intrusive ads, she would roll her eyes: Of course not. But typically, deals require publishers to use heavy creative assets and several miles of ad code meant for targeting and measurement purposes. Some global brands are on the record saying that they won’t engage with publishers who won’t run without targeting mechanisms.

 I know, I know, cry me a river. And I agree that heavy assets should not even make it to Q/A. But barring a hallelujah moment, when all partners in the ad supply chain agree to help each other and enable all boats to rise, placing a moratorium on excessive advertiser scripts is a challenge. Publishers could put their foot down and not run ads that don’t comply with LEAN standards, but then advertisers could go onto the next willing publisher. It will take a village, and cooperation from all parties involved in ad campaigns—brands, agencies, ad tech, exchanges, and publishers—in order to get this right.

 It has to start with the money (looking meaningfully at advertisers). Believe me, if you insist on lean ads, we will comply.

4. Some sites will simply go away.

 There’s a band of content—think celeb body fat pics, gossip, or amateur porn—that we “stumble across” and take for granted. This is the band of content I believe is most vulnerable to ad blocking because it’s often a loss leader on free content sites that people develop dependencies on, but are not sure they would want to show up on a credit card statement.

5. The Blogosphere will contract.

There is a horoscope site I’ve visited religiously for 15 years, and the ad experience is abysmal. The homepage is littered with offers. I’m often redirected to shitty product microsites when I try to close the windows of pop-up ads I never knew I activated.

But I keep going to the site because the horoscopes are good. Meaty. The astrologer puts her heart and soul into them. I know that she lives off of her ads, and I, someone who appreciates her content, want her to make a living from them. Though she clearly doesn’t have the best grasp on user experience.

Such is the plight of the well-meaning independent publisher. They, even ahead of the large legacy digital publishers, are often the worst perpetrators of poor ad experience and most impacted by ad blocking. Ironically, many of these independents are also some of the most rabid defenders of ad blockers and user experience.

 This one hurts me the most personally, having co-founded a company that enables bloggers to monetize via advertising and branded activations. Enabling writers to monetize is what got me into this business to begin with. Many independent publishers have become wise to the issues that are affecting their ad revenue, such as viewability and ad fraud, and have optimized their sites accordingly, but unless the industry at large addresses the bad-ad PR, ad blocking will persist and is completely out of their control.

 Blogging is already in transition, for reasons I’ve written about. But all independent publishers are affected. Why? Let’s start with malware—a very real and prevalent issue that justifies the use of ad blockers. While I’m sure there are examples of malware on top legacy sites, the incidence of it is much higher on independent sites that are unregulated and do not have Q/A staff testing before serving ads.

Those publishers that are not tucked under an established, compliant publishing partner often turn to “less-responsible” representation: think purveyors of popovers, popunders, malware and other forms of digital cooties—oh my poor little horoscopes site! These sites are going to need some form of inoculation as large and widespread as the ad blocker movement.

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Now that I’ve depressed all of us on the publishing side of the equation, I hope you will tune in for the next installment of this series, Part 3, which will dig into the happier side of this story. The innovation side. And hopefully I can address how brands can engage without having to wash their hands afterwards. And how publishers can look at this new “native” landscape without rolling their eyes and thinking, “Same shit, different day.” …Hopefully, anyway.

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