One of my favourite marketing thought leaders is Seth Godin, and I really enjoyed his blog post on adblockers (it is from 2015, but still very applicable). In this post, Seth discusses two of the main parties involved in the adblock war: advertisers and (in a roundabout way) publishers.

On the topic of advertisers, Seth points to three things they could have done to avoid pushing people towards adblocking: avoid secretly tracking people, stop serving ads in sneaky ways (e.g., popovers and popunders) and serve relevant ads.

With countless stories in the news about identity thieves, financial security breaches, and hacked celebrity accounts, the idea of any being tracked online causes concern for many people. While most advertisers use tracking technologies to identify successful marketing efforts and to re-engage potential customers, many consumers have a hard time differentiating these tracking activities from potential security risks.

When it comes to showing relevant ads, many marketers are likely pointing at the previous paragraph in frustration. “How can I show you relevant ads if I don’t know anything about you?!” There is an art to finding that middle ground, or being “just creepy enough” as a marketing colleague of mine once said. With the vast array of marketing and advertising technologies available today, it is far too easy (and tempting) to cross into “too creepy” territory – no matter how innocent the intentions.

As for sneaky advertising methods like popovers and popunders, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a marketing professional who would defend these. I can’t recall ever seeing a popup from a major company like Apple or Starbucks. These sort of shady ads seem to be the domain of smaller and less reputable advertisers like online casinos or unproven dietary supplements.

Unfortunately, many consumers judge all advertisers based on the actions of a few. Each time an advertiser violates their trust, be it with secret tracking or sneaky ad formats, users may become more suspicious of advertising overall. For many, this lack of trust is what leads to the blocking of ads.

Adblocking, Seth says, undermines a fundamental principle of media: free content in exchange for attention. He goes on to explain that ads in older media channels, like TV and print, were kept in check by things like the FCC or paper costs. The web, which does not face similar restrictions, has lead more and more people to believe that the deal (free content in exchange for attention) doesn’t work. They don’t know if the content offered will be worth the attention required.

While most publishers seem willing and capable to limit their advertising to reasonable levels, others are comfortable splitting their content across as many ad-heavy pages as possible (or worse). Because users cannot typically predict what type of publisher they are dealing with until it’s too late, this can lead to mistrust of publishers. When this mistrust leads to the blocking of ads, the fair and reasonable publishers will likely find their ad revenue suffers as well.

As Seth mentions, it is difficult to separate the good from the bad in any sort of scalable way. This is why adblockers started with the sledgehammer approach of “block them all.” With publishers struggling to recover revenue lost to adblockers, many are requesting that adblock users whitelist their site. While some users agree to these reasonable terms, it seems most will not. After all, they can’t be sure about what sort of ads they are agreeing to… the disreputable sites ask them to whitelist as well, and even the good sites can sometimes have dubious ad sources.

Luckily, the adblock community was able to come to a consensus on some reasonable criteria for ads. Now, ads from approved sources can be automatically displayed to adblock users without the need for manual whitelisting. This allows publishers and advertisers to access the growing audience of adblock users. Even better: the ads are shown with the permission of the adblocking masses, which might just help regain their trust.

Hello,
My name is Adriel, and I am an Adblock user.

When I first heard about AdBlock, I didn’t like the idea. I knew that publishers (including many of my favourite websites) depend on advertising revenue to keep the lights on. I believed that many of the early-adopters of Adblock simply wanted to reap the benefits of premium content, without doing their part – offering to consume advertising.

Within two years, I caved and installed my first adblocking program. Why the change of heart? Maybe I was just missing the signs before, but it seemed like ads were becoming worse and worse. At first the annoyances were sparse:

• Suspicious ads claiming a way to “whiten my teeth with one weird trick”? My teeth are fine, thank you – I doubt it works anyway.
• Forcing me to watch a two-minute unskippable ad for something I have no interest in, before watching the video I actually want to view? That’s quite annoying.
• A loud burst of sound erupting, due to an auto-playing video ad, on a website that I don’t expect audio from? Some choice expletives may have been used.

For me, the tipping point came when I experienced many of these minor annoyances in a short period of time. After hunting down yet another rogue browser tab blaring unwanted audio over my music, I’d had enough. Minutes later, I installed Adblock Plus for the first time.

Immediately I noticed a difference, and was impressed. Websites loaded faster, looked cleaner, and I no longer had to worry about unauthorized audio infiltrating my headphones. I apologized to my favourite websites in my head but I knew I could never go back.

Within a year or two I started to see messages from websites, requesting that I help support them by whitelisting their site. I gladly whitelisted many of those sites, happy to have the best of both worlds (blocking poor quality ads, but still supporting the websites I cared about). Unfortunately, many of these websites used the same ad sources as everyone else. Soon, I once again started to notice sketchy ads claiming to know the secret to weight loss using one simple trick (I wonder if it’s the same trick to whiten my teeth…). Worst of all, my old friend “surprise sound” was back. So, I reluctantly re-blocked many of my favourite sites.

A short time later, I noticed a setting in my adblocker labelled “allow non-intrusive advertising”, which was enabled by default. I clicked on the nearby link to “read more” and I was happy to learn about the Acceptable Ads program. This program allows approved ads (based on reasonable criteria) to be displayed directly to adblock users – without the need for them to whitelist websites on a per-case basis. I was also happy to read that 75% of adblock users agreed with the sentiment of this program – they didn’t want to block ALL ads, just the ones they felt were obnoxious or invasive.

As many large publishers started preventing adblock users from accessing their sites, I was saddened by this apparent lose-lose-lose situation. Publishers lost out on (unfortunately non-monetized) traffic, advertisers lost out on ad exposure to a large (and untapped) audience, and adblock users were prevented from consuming the content they desired.

Next, the #adblockwars articles began appearing on LinkedIn. I often found myself in the comments section, trying to spread the word about the Acceptable Ads program. My comments were quickly lost amongst a sea of “adblockers are destroying the internet” vitriol.

I figured that with all the publicity around adblocking, surely there were already solutions being offered. My findings were disheartening: the only solutions I found involved actively battling adblockers. Either clever tools to bypass the adblockers (I could see why that might appeal to some publishers, but I have no idea why an advertiser would want to spend money on ads like that) or stopping adblock users until they whitelisted the website (which always just caused me to close that website, since I knew they would be serving up the typical ads).

No longer willing to play spectator in a war I felt would have no winner, I felt the need to do something. Building on my compassion for all parties involved, I worked with an experienced advertising technology team to start a new ad network. Unblocked Advertising would focus on helping publishers and advertisers work together to reach the adblocking audience – in a way they WANTED to be reached.

I look forward to helping advertisers regain access to a lost audience – whose online ad exposure is otherwise very limited.
I look forward to helping publishers recover lost ad revenue – without requiring their visitors to whitelist them.
And I look forward to keeping my adblocker, safeguarding my sanity – and my eardrums.