Imagining the Web without Adblock Plus

Job Plas

Director of Industry Relations at eyeo

Published Oct 5, 2015

Last week, Eyeo GmbH (the parent company of Adblock Plus), won another lawsuit. The win against Axel Springer — the multi-billion dollar German publishing house — was the fourth consecutive win in the German courts.

However, there are still more parties considering suing adblockers, and companies like Axel Springer announced that they would appeal. Most notably the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has been claiming for a while that they are considering legal action against adblockers.

Cunningham said his organization is also considering legal recourse against ad blockers

This was re-stated by the SVP Scott Cunningham on the day Eyeo beat another multi-billion publishing house.

The irony of the lawsuits

What I have seen in the past year from the different lawsuits, is that they mostly attempt to qualify Eyeo’s Acceptable Ads initiative and business model illegal. See the Adblock Plus blog for more information about our wins against Zeit Online GmbH and Handelsblatt GmbH, against ProSieben/Sat1 and RTL Interactive and against Axel Springer.

I always felt that the lawsuits against Eyeo are ironic. As I outlined in a previous column, the industry forgets that they are the main driver of the growth of adblockers. A recent AOL research found that 62% of the respondents were annoyed by the sheer volume of ads, 75% about seeing the same ad over and over again. An Adobe study from 2012 found that:

68% of consumers find online ads “annoying” and “distracting” and 54% say online banner ads don’t work

And, it looks like the industry still hasn’t learned. A very recent survey from Broadband Genie found that 43% of the respondents deem mobile advertising as more annoying as on desktop. Only 8% said it was “less annoying”.

Consider the first ever banner ad from 1994:

You can easily see how surprisingly little the online advertising industry innovated over the last two decades. And the ‘innovation’ that took place, was making ads bigger, blinking, interfere with the content, or simply hide the fact that they’re ads. And now that people look for a solution against this, the first reflex of some ancient publishers is to sue the tool that users use to protect themselves with.

The effect of continuously annoying the user by forcing annoying adformats down their throat, naturally leads to a proactive search for tools that protect them against this:

“People are pushed towards the adblockers.”

Once installed, 89% of the users claimed it improved their online experience according to a IAB research. No sh*t, Sherlock.

While causing the mess themselves, they still want to accuse Adblock Plus as the main culprit for their struggle to monetize content. However, if your ads did not suck, there would be no need for adblockers. Simple as that.

Attempting to make Acceptable Ads illegal

When Acceptable Ads were announced back in 2011, the initiative has always been welcomed with a lot of resistance. And this has been continuing till today. Publishers and advertisers are still lining up to compare Eyeo with the mafia, a racketeering network or extortionists. One website went as far to accuse the users of Adblock Plus that they were starving little children:

Every time you block an ad, what you’re really blocking is food from entering a child’s mouth.

And I get it. It is frustrating to see adblocking usage increase at an almost exponential pace, threatening the established business models of shoving as much ads as possible into the browser. I also understand that at face value, the Acceptable Ads initiative is hard to understand and could come across as fishy.

However, publishers should welcome it, or even applaud it. Eyeo enables publishers to monetize the part of their traffic that is using Adblock Plus with Acceptable Ads enabled. And because only the large companies are charged, it means that for 90% of the publishers Eyeo takes care of the consultancy, whitelisting and monitoring for free. Even if you are a publisher that does generate a lot of traffic, the service that is offered provides a lot of value in return.

“Eyeo’s Acceptable Ads declared illegal”

Let’s play a little game. Let’s pretend that the IAB’s and old-fashioned publishing houses would have won. They successfully killed Acceptable Ads and with it Eyeo. The champagne has been popped by the lawyers, they congratulate each other on this incredible win.

After losing four court cases in 2015, Eyeo has to remove the Acceptable Ads feature from Adblock Plus in Germany. Naturally, other publishing houses and/or other national chapters of the IAB will coordinate other lawsuits again to kill Acceptable Ads and Eyeo once and for all. Country by country Eyeo would have to remove Acceptable Ads. All the 700 partners that joined the Acceptable Ad initiative will have to cancel the contracts. Eyeo would have to scale down the team significantly. Eventually, the team will be disbanded, and later the company too. Success, Acceptable Ads are killed, and Eyeo with it.

And then what?!

This question has been boggling my mind ever since the the first court case was received.

First, just because Eyeo would cease to exist does not mean that Adblock Plus would also perish/disappear. Actually, Adblock Plus will continue to exist and thrive. It will be maintained by a handful of developers (probably a few of Eyeo too) from the open source community as a hobby again, exactly how it was between 2006–2011. Developers all over the world will continue to fork the Adblock Plus sourcecode (get yours here) and create new, improved adblockers without Acceptable Ads. Other adblockers are also open-source, so pick which adblocker you want to fork!

The community will keep Adblock Plus and other adblockers alive, improve its blocking capabilities, keep on forking it, and bring it to new platforms.

Second, the growth of adblocking is organic, 50% discover adblockers through word-of-mouth. Adblock Plus and other adblockers are growing at the same rate. This will continue, no matter whether Eyeo exists or not.

Third, over 700 publishers currently on the whitelist will see a huge decrease in earnings, because their unobtrusive Acceptable Ads will not be shown to products with Acceptable Ads integrated anymore. This setback will probably be death by a thousand cuts for quite some publishers.

In conclusion, after successfully suing Eyeo and effectively killing the company, there will be multiple well-maintained and innovative adblocking solutions available. None of them will have Acceptable Ads integrated because this is illegal. Multiple publishers cannot monetize any of their adblocking audience anymore.

My genuine question is what does the IAB and publishing houses such as Axel Springer, Pro7-SAT1, Handelsblatt, Zei Online hope to accomplish? Is it really the pure incapability of taking a longer-term perspective on this? Don’t they realize that IF they would succeed, they could kill perhaps one of the only sustainable solutions against their ever feared destruction of the free web by adblockers?

The Solution

Put the user first. Full stop.

If the online advertising industry wants to survive, they will have to fully support a paradigm shift. Instead of letting financial incentives drive publishers to serve more and more annoying ads, the focus should be on the user, and the user only. I personally like how Jeff Jarvis phrased this in a column in the Observer:

The real lesson in the era of ad-blockers is that the customer is finally and truly in charge. Until now, advertising technology has mostly enabled more irritation, intrusion, repetition, opacity and creepiness as the co-conspiratorial industries — advertising, media and technology — desperately try to shoehorn old measures of success — reach and frequency, or now unique users and pageviews — into a new reality. They must reimagine marketing from the customer down.

As the Adobe & Pagefair research shows, adblock users are not necessarily against all ads, just the annoying ones:

And this confirms what Eyeo already established in 2011, that roughly 75% of adblocking users could imagine that some non-obtrusive ads would be allowed to support free websites:

One can conclude that users are not annoyed by all ads, but very annoyed by the most obtrusive ones (pre-rolls, overlays, pop-ups etc). This clearly shows that publishers should not integrate annoying ads — even if they provide higher CTRs, CPMs — on their websites anymore, but move to unobtrusive text or still image ads.

Advertising is not dead, but a radical different approach is required.

Calling for an open dialogue

Naturally, you can keep on suing Eyeo or looking for ways to attempt to circumvent the blocking. However, this goes against the user’s choice. This is, from my point of view is absolutely critical. Users can and should always be able to customize their experience on the Web. It is a fundamental right of the user. Whether it is accessing websites using a VPN, block tracking requests, block all JavaScript elements on pages, disable all images, access pages in a reading-mode, and yes, block all annoying ads or all ads. It is not up to the publishing houses to decide how the user wants to consume their content.

As Commissioner Julie Brill at the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division Annual Conference noted:

Clearly, there is consumer demand for ad-blocking. I urge industry to create robust and innovative tools to address this demand in a sophisticated way. Not to find ways around consumer choice, but to provide consumers with something they clearly want: to see advertising that respects their privacy and that they can trust.

To accomplish this, Eyeo again, and again, and again, calls for an open dialogue with publishers, advertisers, and most of all, users. Now even more than ever, that it was decided to give up control of the Acceptable Ads criteria by establishing an independent board.

Google is setting the right example. During AdWeek, Sridhar Ramaswam — Google’s top advertising executive — said the following during this interview (adblocking action starting at 24 minutes):

“We need to work together to come up with a definition of what an acceptable ad is and what an acceptable ads program can be.”

And later in the interview:

“I think it’s going to be difficult for us to agree as an industry, but it’s one of those cases where not agreeing is actually going to lead to a much worse outcome for all of us.”

And yes, this is also what I call for. Joining forces to set new standards for the Web regarding advertising. A paradigm shift is not desirable, but paramount.

Follow the exemplary role of Google in this. We’d love a more open dialogue.