Blocking ads – have your cake and eat it too?

Categorized under Internet

Many times I bump into some blog and even before having a glance at the article, I am presented with about 5-6 pop-up ads! After either closing or ignoring those, I start reading that article and at the same time, those square ad banners placed above, and below, and on both sides of the first paragraph start flashing with an exciting message on it as “you have won $50000″! I try hard to ignore it (though it continues flashing through my eye corners). And then suddenly voilà! The whole article disappears and another cool graphics turns up full screen with a polite message on top corner “Skip this ad to return to the article”. By the time, done with all this exercise; I am no longer in a mood to continue reading.

It is said that web 2.0 is about “wisdom of crowd” but is it really perceived in that sense by the crowd after all? All these new web technologies have made it a lot easier to launch a website stuffed with abundant of cool features — and that too without dropping a penny out of pocket! But is it all really helping to create informative web resources than mere duplications? Today we find tons of websites (yes, including blogs) revolving around same topics and even filled up with same content (generated using someone else’s rss feed). And what’s the motivation behind creating such websites? Well, conspicuously, it’s just about milking the gorgeous Google Adsense cow than anything else.

As with every need, there are inventions indeed! To get rid of this advertisement irritation, there is a stream of tools being developed; and AdBlock-Plus is one of them. It’s an open source advertisement blocking tool, developed by Wladimir Palant, that can be installed as a plug-in to Mozilla FireFox web browser. And guess what? … once configured, it removes all the advertisements from a page before rendering it in the browser! Quite obviously, it has received considerable appreciation from web content consumer’s side; and quite more obviously there is an outcry from web content publishers and advertisers community against it.

Opponents of AdBlock-Plus are projecting it as an evil that can create a serious threat to existing web 2.0 business model which is largely based on advertisement revenue. Internet advertisement revenues are projected to be around USD 66 billion by year 2010! Now web content consumers usually don’t want to (and have to) pay money for online content and services these days. And so their attention has being utilized to generate revenue. Saying no to advertisements is equivalent to demanding either no services or paid services. Having said that, it is still unfair to take consumers for granted and then targeting with aggressive and irrelevant marketing irritation; and if it fails some business model then so be it. Instead, I’d say, it’s a right time to rethink about that very business model itself. If you’re providing a valuable service for free; you’re, no doubt, entitled to make some money through advertisement. Agreed. But it doesn’t mean bombarding viewers with it to the level of irritation; it’s gonna degrade the value of your content too, ain’t it? Showing relevant and useful ads in an non-obtrusive manner can, in fact, be conceived as value addition to the content by it’s consumers. For example, if you are writing about movies and advertisements are about upcoming movie trailers then consumers would love to see it, wouldn’t they?

Now, there are two options for content publishers and advertisers to defend the ad blocking tools — one is a quick but short term fix whereas another one is a slower but long term solution. First one is to find technically superior methods to detect ad blocking tools and then refuse content or to imbibe ads so tightly with the content that those will pass ad filters. This option will trigger a tug of war between filter developers and filter breakers! Second option asks advertisers to rethink about creativity while creating ads (rather than using cheap gimmicks like “you have won $50000″) so to make them genuinely appealing. And more importantly, it asks publishers to be discerning about quality and quantity of advertisement placed over web site.

In short, development of ad blocking tools is definitely a step towards betterment of the web as an information sharing platform; and making advertisements as valuable and appealing as the content itself will ensure a win-win game for everyone playing with it.