This year has been one big coming-out party for ad blocking. Thanks to Apple’s high-profile entry into the space, ad blocking has greatly increased its traction, resulting in more users leveraging tools like AdBlock and Adblock Plus to remove ads from a website. By deploying massive “filter lists”, ad blockers target not only display ads but also sponsored content widgets from Taboola and Outbrain. Even the so-called native ads can fall victim to it.
Ad blockers have a “block everything rule” that makes donation buttons, visitor counters and analytic tools no longer work. There are also other filter rules to block loading images and requests to third-party services. Publishers include in the “block everything” list will see their page view numbers go down, further affecting their ad revenue.
Video has become another ad-blocking battleground for publishers. Marketers have been negotiating with software providers to define the “appropriate” video format. According to Adblock Plus, it strived to optimize users’ video viewing experience by allowing only those that need to be clicked to play and cannot be pre-roll before other content.
Publishers have also decided to target only at interested users in response to this trend, driving programmatic advertising such as Google DoubleClick on fire. In addition to better targeting, Google has made moves to increase the speed of mobile pages and to allow flexible ad placements so that banners would appear on the most suitable platform.
Other publishers have expended more money in new advertising formats, such as Skippable YouTube Ads, which leave users with greater discretions. YouTube’s new ads appear either in-display, which is on the queue of related videos to the right, or in-stream, which are the pre-roll ads that can be skipped after five seconds. YouTube’s targeting tools allowed retailers’ resources going to viewers who have demonstrated interest in the ad. In addition, since research has shown that retail ads seeing the most engagement weren’t utility driven, but were instead the entertaining ones, brands and publishers started to feature more product demos, testimonials and how-to videos so as to increase their products’ awareness.
Relevant Links:
http://digiday.com/agencies/theres-new-boss-town-ad-blockers/
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