Restriction of access to pages for users of “banner cutters”, expert opinions

You, for certain, remember our large-scale poll of representatives of Russian media concerning the state of affairs in the fight against advertising blockers, the proportion of users and so on.



I would like to continue this eventful topic.



Firstly, the reason for this does not cease to set the German weekly Bild, for some time on the main page of which, when you try to enter with the blocker on, the following is shown.



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And, in addition, last week it became known that after 5 unsuccessful for Axel Springer (publisher of the Bild newspaper) court hearings in relation to the developer AdBlock Plus (Eeyo), the publisher decided to continue the litigation strategy, switching to the developers of similar solutions " smaller.



And the national edition of CNews, apparently deciding to increase its own advertising inventory, to users who have come to their own pages and are trying to follow the links, shows this notice.







Restrictions that do not allow a website visitor to freely browse materials on its pages, depending on the absence or presence of certain extensions (in this particular case - ad blocker), cease to amaze anyone.



In this regard, we decided to ask the experts involved two simple questions:

1. Is there a future for such a strategy to deal with banner cutters?
2. In your opinion, what are the legal perspectives of court cases regarding “restriction of competition” aimed at blocking developers?

Herman Klimenko, “IRI”:

Such a local struggle with ad blockers is comparable in effectiveness to the crusades of the beginning of the second millennium. Subject marked. There are knights, but they are few and not from the top of the ruling class. PR a lot, but the result is not very. Without consolidated support of leaders: Google, Apple, Microsoft, such demarches are unlikely to be more effective than Don Quixote's attacks.

Alexey Ametov, the publishing editor of the media projects of the group Look At Me:

It will not work. Neither restrictions nor claims.

Leonid Delitsyn, an expert of the financial holding company "FINAM":

The legal perspectives of court cases of this kind, in our opinion, are elusive, since the display of advertising is the main way of earning online media. The publication is fully capable of approving the policy of individual content delivery to users and writing users with banner-cutters into a separate category. As a rule, such users make up a very small share of the audience, moreover, the permanent audience of online media is generally small compared to the one they buy from portals or attract by exchanging banners. By itself, the fight against banner cutters is probably just the experiments of the management of this or that media, but it can hardly be considered as part of a business model. Indeed, in most business publications, advertising is quite relevant, and contains information that readers also want to see. Banner shears, of course, can be armed with the forum frequenter, who uses the media not as a source of information, but as a communication tool - but such - units.

Jovan Savovich, the owner of "Leprozoria" and Dirty:

It seems to me that this is archaic and short-sighted, because it undermines the trust of users, and users are all that we have. There is no future in the fight against banner cutters, I think.

Advertising should be native and pleasing users, and not forcing them to cut and block things.

Igor Gladkoborod, technical director Coub:

Many publications do something like this. But basically, it’s not content blocking, but please disable blocking, explaining that advertising allows the publication to live.



I'm not sure about court cases. Most likely, this, on the contrary, will give good PR to banner cutters and more people will put them to themselves.



With the fact that some users use banner cutters, you need to put up with the inevitable evil and try to negotiate with them in a good way in order to reduce this percentage.

Dmitry Navosh, Sports.ru:

I do not yet have a clear position on the initiative of Bild and CNews. She looks harsh. On the other hand, if publications due to a shortage of money begin to close even faster than they close now, no one would be better off, including blocking advertising by users.

What do you think?



The publication is updated.