A revolution in blocking online advertising is coming (Part 2)

With the arrival of iOS 9, advertisers, site owners and even Google itself will have a hard time.

In short : In September, the new Apple iOS 9 operating system will be released, in which revolutionary changes will occur in the advertising blocking mechanism. Innovations will have far-reaching implications not only for websites and advertisers, but also, perhaps, affect the balance in the world of mobile platforms and even Google’s revenue.

Why is that? Let's try to figure it out.

The first part is available here .
')
A recent Reuters poll shows that people do not like advertising. Unfortunately, the survey does not indicate how many people who do not block ads know about the possibility of doing so.



Attitude to advertising and the use of programs that block advertising /

But wait a minute, but what does all this look like under the prism of morality? How about the fact that sites lose profits if you block ads?

I already wrote that these two sides are very far from each other. Ad blocking is akin to speeding: those who do this can justify themselves, while those who consider it wrong are violently opposed to such actions.

It's funny that when I tweeted how many tracking tools I managed to block using Ghostery (I tried Ghostery, AdBlock, Javascript Blocker and uBlock as part of an experiment to see how they affect my user experience). I immediately began to poke fingers and announced in the destruction of journalism:

@GeorgeBouras @charlesarthur By blocking ads, you destroy quality media and journalism. Do you not consider yourself responsible for them? - Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis), July 26, 2015

Am I responsible for them? Not really. This is what happened to me as an ordinary reader: I accepted an invitation to read the article, but I do not think we understood each other about tracking my actions, about how numerous ad networks define me to this or that group of users, and beg for consent to the processing of my data and interfere with my reading experience. Doesn't my agreement need at least the last two points?

And so I answered as follows:

@jeffjarvis @GeorgeBouras I find it dangerous that readers should (or will) tolerate everything that advertisers like. - Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur), July 26, 2015

You can watch the full correspondence on Twitter here .

Printed publications have evolved. Now it's up to web advertisers
This is part of the discussion, which interests me very much (and, I confess, amuses). Printed publications needed to evolve and not repeat the history of dinosaurs, because the Internet was at the next stage of development: advertisers went online and had to follow them or die.

Now we are all connected to the Internet. And what, we must unquestioningly accept online advertising for what it is, never shy away from it and not question it? Well, of course, that’s how we accelerated. Why should web advertisers be protected from evolutionary or revolutionary changes in user habits? Caesar's Caesar's - that which was swallowed by the print media, should not be across the throat and at the web advertisers. I don’t remember that the people who accused me of using blockers for advertising tracking tools, argued that everyone should go back to print ads, as they bring more profit (which they still do).

Moreover, any arguments that are trying to build a moral dam in front of a technological river are doomed. Napster, Bittorrent, now we are dealing with ad blocking.

Which will quickly lead to ...

If a significant number of users switch to the use of ad-blocking applications, web advertisers will have to quickly navigate to cope with a cruel reality for them. As well as online publishers.

Although, I must confess that I do not feel sorry for the "publishers" from the online world. In the early days of the Internet, Guardian had a wonderful ad that asked, “Have you ever thought about how much news comes out every day, how much can you fit into a newspaper?” She advertised the Guardian website and the fact that you find more news than could physically fit in a newspaper.

What now? There are a huge number of sites, but most of them are just copies that are monetized by Google ads or someone else’s. They catch all the unique content from other portals. And think about how much news appears every day: more than it could fit into a newspaper, but less than it could fill all sites that currently consider themselves to be "news." If blocking ads leads to a fall in the popularity of copies, I will not cry. This is not journalism. This is something like a terrible shorthand, even worse than that - shorthand is issued for journalism and on some large sites. The high-quality press and decent sites will remain afloat. Or good journalists.

What form will this evolution take? Look at sites like Buzzfeed and how they use their own content. If the site generates advertising, it is not so easy to block. In a sense, we are returning to the country of the printed word, where we worked on content and advertising at the same time and in one place.

Ecosystem Fight

Moreover, in the long run, there is also a potential impact. I don’t think that Apple was happily thinking about how to do Google crap when the company decided to open ways to block ads, but this could have tangible consequences.

Imagine: iOS 9 appears, and many iOS platform users say how happy they are to block all these annoying advertisements (Do not overestimate how quickly iOS 9 will be picked up: the system will be available even for outdated devices, starting with iPhone 4S and iPad 2, and takes up less space than iOS 8. Even iOS 8 was on half of apple devices two months after the release). Meanwhile, Android users will not be able to go the same way (in the hope of achieving a similar effect). At least one of two things will happen:

• Some Android users will start considering switching to iPhone.
• Google will have to open the possibility of blocking ads on Google Play in order to avoid users leaving the Android platform.

Both are bad for Google. The loss of Android users in the short term may be more tolerable. Ad blocking can be a global catastrophe for Google (that's why it pays Adblock Plus developers not to block Google ads).

It is unlikely that ad blocking will ever be able to reach the scale that would be a mortal danger to Google. But more and more new users from developing countries are coming to the Internet, and, paying for every kilobyte of information, they may well want to block ads. In particular, India can already be called a technologically savvy country with a high cost of Internet traffic. And she happily accepted Android. Imagine what this might mean for Google.

By the way, the company Global Web Index conducted a survey associated with the use of programs to block ads. According to its results, 27% of users aged 16 to 64 years from 33 countries in which the survey was conducted, use the application to block ads, and 15% block the tracking of their actions.



We also have data for Europe, thanks to research from Statista:



Think about the fact that this data is unlikely to fully reflect the situation in the mobile industry. But now it is mobile platforms that are the most popular. The ability to block ads for one of the main mobile platforms will appear in September.

Unexpectedly, this can all be quite dismal for the advertising industry.