Want your Spotify account to remain? Better disable that Adblocker

Releasing a new version of their terms of service, Spotify has promised to take a harder stance on ad blockers, bots and fraudulent streaming activities, starting March 1st. 

Ad blockers have always been an easy loophole for consumers, and a headache for publishers. The company confirmed in March last year that it had 2,000,000 users using ad blockers on the free version of Spotify. While that sounds a lot, it's only 1.3% of Spotify's total user base, yet it warrants enough attention as it restates usage metrics. 

The new guidelines specify that “circumventing or blocking advertisements in the Spotify Service, or creating and distributing tools designed to block advertisements in the Spotify Service” may now result in “immediate termination or suspension of your Spotify account.”

During its last quarter earning report announcement yesterday, Spotify shows positive income and free cash flow for the first time since it was founded. Revenue, however, was below expectations because of intense competition from other streaming services, with subscribers increasing 36 percent to 96 million. Paid subscriptions now compose nearly 88% of Spotify's turnover - which is why Spotify wants to release the potential of ad supported revenue. And with Spotify's actual user base of 153,000,000 people across the world (and expanding), ad supported revenue can really bring in the billions. 

Publishers' Adaptive Strategies against Ad-Blocking

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/

Websites know you're using ad-blockers and they're coming for you

Users are increasingly using ad blockers to stop ads from interrupting their browsing experience when they go online, often forgetting that these ads generate the revenue that keeps the websites whose content they consume alive and running.
As the use of this type of software increases, publishers are finding workarounds to counter their spread, even offering the alternative to subscribe to newsletters or premium content. This is a real concern for publishers as ad blockers not only target desktop readership but are now also making their way to other devices such as mobile via specific apps.
The "counter attack" is an opportunity for publishers and content creators to educate content consumers in how the business model operates. An understanding that content is only free because it's supported by either ads or subscriptions is necessary, and readers who refuse to acknowledge this may not deserve to have access to the content in the first place. Publishers are now coming up with alternatives to capture revenue from those who are fed up with ads. This trend is set to grow, just like ad-block use has in recent times.

Original article
http://mashable.com/2015/09/12/passive-agressive-ad-blockers/#Kw0HNSSaLSks