“Banner cutters” and what representatives of Russian media think about them, instructions for checking the percentage of users with blockers on their website

AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, AdGuard and other browser extensions that allow you to block ads on any web pages affect the media landscape, whose main source of earnings is still selling ads. YouTube, which falls into the category of “media” with a big stretch, also suffers from the serious influence of ad blockers.

At Megamind, we pay a lot of attention to this topic, since it becomes more and more difficult to ignore it.

In order to focus not only on the information that comes to us from the West: from Germany, where the litigation took place between Eeyo (developer of AdBlock Plus) and Axel Springer (both organizations with the German registration), or from the USA - from the main and largest media market, where similar developments are beginning to appear, we decided to ask the people doing media in Russian what they think about the ever-increasing proportion of users blocking ads on their pages.
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The questions that we addressed to the editors-in-chief of popular publications are as follows:

1. Do you personally use AdBlock / AdBlock Plus or similar browser extensions (ad blockers)?
2. As a media project manager, what do you think about the growing popularity of ad blockers?
3. Can you name the percentage of your own audience using similar extensions on your pages?
4. Are you struggling somehow with AdBlock / AdBlock Plus and similar extensions?
5. Would you join the boycott of ad blockers if it were carried out by several large media projects together?

Answers to questions are presented in the same sequence.



Denis Kryuchkov , publisher of projects of the company "TM" :

1. I use it, but only for professional purposes. I watch how and what is blocked on different sites.
2. Considering the reputation that Internet advertising has created for itself in recent years, and that it has been years since the advent of the Internet, the growth in popularity of Internet advertising blockers has been inevitable. If you look at the situation through the eyes of the user, watching and reading websites without advertising is much more pleasant than with it. It is obvious. And nobody in general cares that for current publishers, advertising is the only earnings model. At least in Russia. From here it is necessary to make a start. The process is inevitable, publishers need to adapt to the new reality. Unfortunately, the growth of popularity of such software will only continue.
3. 3 and 4 questions: At peak, we had about 43% of users with an ad blocker installed. Now - about 30%. It was possible to significantly reduce the share by referring to the users who installed this software and by explaining that advertising, no matter how it should be treated, helps develop.
4. Difficult and delicate question. Which every month becomes more relevant for publishers. We must see what will happen next.

Ilya Dyer , publisher of Medusa :

1. Not. I do advertising, it is strange to block it, so you can skip some interesting ideas.
2. This is an absolutely understandable process - people are fed up with banners. With banners in general, everything is not thankful to God, and not only because of AdBlock - those who do not use blockers, often banners simply do not notice.
3. Not considered, but, I think, percent 20.
4. Not. Someday we’ll hang up a neat request to put Medusa on an exception, but for us this is not a priority - the majority of advertising on Medusa is native, and AdBlock does not take it.
5. I think there are more important things to join. Also, what does the boycott mean? Do not give readers to read the publication? I'm against.

Dmitry Navosha , CEO of the publication Sports.ru :

1. Not. For testing I put it a couple of times to make sure of certain user problems - for example, when the blockers cut off the match center teaser on the main page of Sports.ru, responding to the word teaser.
2. This, of course, is a big problem for independent media and services. For large, “ecosystem” players like Yandex, Facebook or Google, they are less threatened - and because their margins are much higher, the loss of one fifth of revenue may not have dramatic consequences. And because it is easier for them to negotiate with ad blockers or to pay them so that they consider their advertisements acceptable. And because they, in the end, owning the ecosystem, can somehow block the blockers. “Stand-alone” projects, in general, this trend is more threatening, on the other hand, their audience is often loyal. Therefore, in our attempts to solve the problem, we turned to this loyalty.
3. This percentage reached 20%.
4. We tried to display a special explanation for such users that our sites and applications pay off only with advertising, because we don’t take money from users. And they were asked to bring us to the exclusion of their banner cutter. In principle, it worked - almost half turned off.
5. Frankly, I do not quite imagine the mechanics of such a boycott. But communication with users on the topic “there will be no advertising - there will be no website and applications”, I think, we will continue. In addition, for those who are completely orthodox in relation to advertising, we create an alternative in the applications - a paid subscription, we do not show ads to subscribers. In the Android application Sports.ru it is already implemented, in iOS it will be from day to day - a new app is already under moderation.

Yuri Synod , publisher of Roem :

1. No, I do not use it - this or that advertising campaign may induce industry news to itself. For a journalist, cutting ads is unprofessional.
2. Data on the growth of the audience of edblockers and influence are not very convincing, in particular, it is not clear what percentage of such an audience is this time. It is not clear the influence of this audience on the advertising market, these are two. Third, the money that was blackmailed from advertising systems still leaves ads in the user's browser, it just magically becomes “ethical”. Under such boundary conditions, a shaft of articles in the press about the terrible threat from blockers looks more like an attempt by edblockers to get more PR and, accordingly, money from all market players. They have enough money for PR, they work competently - even in Russia they hired a PR-agency and walked through the media.
3. If our reader does not want to see advertising - well, he is not a fool, he himself made such a decision. Our readers have high qualifications, I don’t want to deal with them.
4. In the boycotts also do not see the point.

Nikolay Belousov , creator and former editor in chief of Cossa :

1. Not. He began to eat too much RAM and cause braking of the computer.
2. This is normal. We need to come up with new models of monetization.
3. Difficult to answer.
4. Not.
5. No, I do not see the need.

Alexey Ametov , co-founder and publisher of media projects of Look At Me holding:

1. I tested it, but I don’t use it because it’s important for me to watch what happens with media advertising on the Internet + I think it’s not entirely ethical to do this when you work in media
2. I think that the growing popularity of blockers is a response to aggressive and low-quality advertising, to fullscreen and pre-rolls. Users are tired of all this and are looking for an opportunity to get rid of this garbage.
3. We estimate that 15–20% of our monthly audience use Adblock.
4. We show users with ad blockers messages with a request to include our sites in the list of exceptions, since advertising helps us to earn the money we need for the work of projects. About a third of users listened to our request.
5. The problem is not in media projects. Yes, we suffer, but this is not our war. The problem is in shit sites with pop-ups, doorway pages and in Youtube with its long prerolas.

Konstantin Panfilov , editor-in-chief of VC.ru (formerly “Zuckerberg Call”):

1. Not. Because, first of all, I’m wondering how the advertising market is developing, and secondly, I don’t want to leave my colleagues without a fair penny, thirdly, ad blockers sometimes cut some useful scripts or layout at the same time.
2. While they do not block native advertising and special projects, there is nothing to fear.
3. When we conducted a survey of market participants, we found out that this indicator usually ranges from 10% to 20%. We have about the same.
4. Last year, they hung up special banners calling for AdBlock to be turned off, after they started painting the site in black and white for those who have the banner cutter turned on.
5. Our task is to make advertising (since we use this method of monetization) pleasant and useful (for us, for the user, and for the advertiser). This can be forgotten if we shed blood senselessly.

Nikita Likhachev , editor in chief of TJournal :

1. Personally, I do not use any blockers: like many media vendors, I constantly evaluate who uses what formats. Okay, I just love it when they show me many, many, many advertisements that cannot be closed.
2. Advertising blockers didn’t arise artificially: people already realized that they don’t get the benefits of display advertising, and advertising agencies still want to ride the old formats. All are slowly moving to native advertising, but so far very few people can. It is good, it is right, and it should be done. Hopefully, Apple and its content blockers (as they deftly dodged the real nature of the service, right?) Will make a revolution.
3. We have not measured the data on the use of blockers for a very long time. Roughly it can be assumed that their 20-25%.
4. At TJ, we are not fighting with blockers. On vc.ru (we are with them, consider one big team) there is such a practice: when AdBlock is turned on, the site is displayed in black and white. This reduced the number of users with blockers from 20% to 5%.
5. I would not join the boycott of the blockers. First, it will not do anything: you can not stand in the way of progress. Secondly, there are users who use blockers to combat the dominance of advertising - so let them use it. But if the user specifically blocks us, then probably there is a moral right to block him in response - one way or another.

Instructions for checking the percentage of users with an ad blocker on your website

• It is important to determine what function of the banner exchange platform AdBlock blocks when loading your page on the client;
• In the case of the AdRiver platform (for example), AdBlock Plus cuts out the function function adriver(ph, prm, defer) ;
• Next, you need to set a custom "Dimension" ("User parameters") in Google Analytics like this:

   var adblock_on = (typeof adriver == 'undefined') ? 'yes' : 'no'; ga('set', 'dimension1', adblock_on); 

• Done! Now in most Google Analytics reports, you can filter the result by this user parameter.