According to PageFair’s latest report, ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months and there are now 198 million active adblock users around the world.
That fact is worrying advertisers. But what’s the reason? Over-zealous publishers who litter their pages with ads that clutter users’ experience, say a couple of executives who participated in an industry panel.
“I think specific abusive advertising experiences by certain publishers (are to blame),” says Sourcepoint Technology chief revenue officer Jared Lansky, whose company, founded by Admeld founder Ben Barokas, helps publishers instead “compensate” users for their attention.
“You go to a particular site and it just overtakes the experience; it’s too much and you want to get out. There’s no other option today than to install an ad blocker.”
Ghostery product director Jeremy Tillman agrees. His company makes a browser add-on that helps users see and control which companies can track them, including block them.
The problem is especially acute in mobile. “For a user, it slows it down and makes it more sluggish – they actually see the impact on the bill,” Tillman says.
But, he caveats: “Not all ads are created equal,. About 60% of our users want to stop disruptive ads.” But that diminishes for less intrusive inline ads, social and others ads.
The session was moderated by John Montgomery, Chairman of GroupM Connect.
This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
