Bestselling Ad-Blocking App Will Soon Show Ads

“Once we connect the dots on those two points and match the advertising and the site experiences with the demands of consumers, we’ll be righting the ship – or at least containing the problem”. Chances are they’re a minor distraction, a rectangle or square that you’re used to ignoring. It makes sense, Murphy said. Maybe it’ll be you.

But maybe an ad caught your attention because it was in your face. You only cancel out as many ads as you pay for. If you’ve shopped online in the last few years, you’ll have experienced the way that pair of shoes or fancy frying pan you considered buying follows you around the Web for weeks afterwards. It will force many advertisers to adopt a pay-per-click model and risk being scammed by advanced robots that will be coming in from fake IP addresses and clicking though ads as if they were interested customers. What bothers me is when even I can tell they are bogging down a page’s load time and building a profile of my behavior.

Furthermore, an expectation of getting something for nothing proliferated with casual piracy.

Subscriptions remain viable in some areas.

And in an article in The Wall Street Journal, Murphy admits he is taking money from Eyeo to automatically whitelist a number of sites.

While the dispute about ad-blocking extensions has been ongoing, it’s been kicked into overdrive by the controversy surrounding the ad blockers that are already available for download on your iPhone. Pages would often look broken or not work, or would constantly have to be turned on and off to watch something like Youtube. Publishers who have their own applications need not worry as these ad blockers do not affect third party apps installed on the device.

With iOS 9, Apple allows consumers to block unwanted content, such as ads, in Safari on mobile devices. A trade association representing digital advertisers has said these ads are the future of digital advertising because they’re a less intrusive, richer and more useful to the reader. It’s that simple. The right messaging to those using ad blockers, he added, “may be the occasion to talk honestly about the economics of the business”. In the 1980s, advertising online was verboten, and within a very short time, early ad-blocking software was born. This brought publishers and developers at loggerheads, and now there’s another twist in the tale. Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Targeted ads largely solve John Wanamaker’s problem, serving up specific offers for products and promotions just to a category of users who are likely to be interested. “The traditional display ad experience doesn’t resonate”, he said.

Without those tools, it’s more hard to know what your audience enjoys, and what they want more of.

Different surveys suggest different levels of ad-blocking adoption in the USA and internationally.

The open web or closed apps?

So it’s Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Facebook saw one billion people on its site in a single day recently. Google will do so by default with a message that says, “Thank you for being a Contributor” or with a pixel pattern. Now that we’re expanding our options for blocking ads on our phones – and apps like Purify, that do just that, have begun to appear in the App Store – a mobile-centric public is deciding to sign on.

Marketers will be forced to produce better adsIt would be naive for Apple to believe that content-producing blogs and sites can keep functioning without ad revenues. But the reality is making things and putting them onto a quality site costs money.

My conclusion: these are training camp days for an industry response to ad blocking. While ad blockers benefit some people, they hurt others, which makes the debate not black and white, but all shades of gray. And here too, I’m optimistic that there will be a renaissance in creativity and innovation once everyone fully understands the channel and learns to marry it to good old-fashioned storytelling.

Publishers are naturally dismayed by this trend and are fighting back. uBlock Origin and Disconnect both block ads and trackers. Eyeo is sticking to its original policy and will continue to block ads that are too disruptive or invasive to users. Essentially, it comes down to this: publishers that rely on web advertising are helping to drive revenue to Apple’s archenemy, Google, which controls much of the infrastructure for online ads.

Winning one of these automated auctions means you get to fill the ad space being presented to you.