There is Something Even Worse than Ad Blockers

Ad Blocking hurts the content generators as they are not able to monetize their productions. But, according to a report from IAB, other factors are even more painful.

While ad blocking accounts, according to the report, for $781 million in losses, invalid traffic and infringed content total almost $7 billion. Invalid traffic is that generated by bots, also called non-human traffic generates losses because fraudulent webpages get paid for advertisement that they print to their bots.

Infringed content means basically that content generated by publishers is distributed illegally, preventing them from the ad revenue they could generate. Some examples of this behavior are Netflix password sharing or music and movies piracy. While currently the industry is spending about $33 million to fight piracy, efforts have not been enough to cut the estimated $2.4 billion a year the industry is losing.

Still, online advertising is growing at a 25% rate for 3Q15 and one could not expect these kind of growth to be trouble free. Nevertheless, they are very sensible issues that will have to be sorted out in order to find balance in the industry.

Read more