An Ad-less Internet

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A fascinating experiment and follow-up by Ars Techinca on ad blockers.

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website.

I was recently on a roadshow with some folks from EyeWonder, a company that provides a framework to build and place a lot of the ads on the Internet. Some are very clever, others would fall into the annoying category. During the trip I talked to a lot of the creatives at big agencies who are working with sites to place these ads for their brands and the adblocker concern was a big topic. If their brands aren’t getting the views on the ad, they’re not going to want to pony up, and sites lose money.

What’s worse, is that it becomes a downward spiral where the ads being served become more intrusive in order to get the attention of a fading audience. Ultimately, one of the best conversations I had was with someone who used to be the creative “gate” for agencies on a major network of sites. Agencies came to her with their ad ideas and she was the person who gave thumbs up or thumbs down on the ad depending on whether or not it was too obnoxious or wouldn’t jive with what the network’s users expect.

To me, that’s the key. Flash may be synonymous with advertising now, but the same obnoxious ads are going to be created with HTML5 when it becomes prevalent, so the people creating ads have to build them so that they’re targeted and interesting. I don’t think they have to be static, or can’t take up the whole page, but they should follow some basic guidelines (auto-playing sound being a terrible, terrible scourge) and leave the user in control. Close buttons should be obvious, mouse out events should minimize the ad, and it should be difficult to accidentally trigger it. And making sure ads are optimized so they aren’t causing Flash to spin up the CPUs is key to a good user experience.

The web is an interactive place and there is a lot of very interesting work going on in the interactive advertising space. That work directly funnels money back to your favorite sites and pays a lot of bills.

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  • leef

    I hope blanket advertising dies, and is concretely replaced by contextual-info-advertisements. Random ad’s are more like spam than anything else. Has anyone ever purchased Progressive car insurance under the influence of ads like this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrtMM5suUCg

    Every night I lie down with the following prayer, “Dear Eywa hear my voice (brought to you by Crest). May the future be lit with highly targeted contextual informational ads, and the age of annoying spamvertised ads, like these forever be banished to exile.”

  • JulesLt

    The problem with what even leef is suggesting is that it’s still dependent on a correlation between audience, product, and sales driven off that advertising. There isn’t always one.

    In traditional print publishing, it was still viable to produce a magazine that wasn’t ad-dependent (i.e. most titles serving niche audiences – if they offer advertising it’s generally cheap and serving a niche audience – you can’t charge a lot for an ad that reaches 4000 people). What you could do is put the cover price up.

    The problem on the web – and particularly looking at the comments on the Ars piece – is that there’s this huge number of people out there who are financially delusional. They hate advertising . . . but they hate paying even more. Which is fine if you stick to your guns and only support amateur content – what’s delusional is the attitude that taking a free ride on the dumb paying masses is sustainable.

  • http://www,brandonellis.org Brandon Ellis

    Hey Ryan,
    Would be nice it there was a framework that handled the page execution of ads. Ads could be marked with rel=”advertisement” and placed in a cue that could stagger the loading. That could help identify which ad producers were optimizing and who is holding up the game.

    I do believe the bigger culprits in making page loads bottleneck are Google Analytics and the social media APIs.

    I already have GA and api.facebook.com pointing to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file and it makes a world of difference. ;)

  • http://www.sliderocket.com Mitch

    Just think how even more obnoxious advertising could become when it can potentially interact with the entire page and isn’t relegated to the flash layer…

  • leef

    @Jules

    I’m not saying advertising should be or will ever be done away with. I am saying advertisers must become more sophisticated in deciding when & where to advertise. The wrong ad in the wrong place at the wrong time does more harm than good to the product in my opinion. How is the experience of spam in your inbox any different than spam on your television or youtube? I anticipate the value of spamvertising will drop over the years and be replaced by effective contextual info-advertising. But maybe I’m overly optimistic.

  • ryanstewart

    @Jules, you’re absolutely right about the comments. The problem is that the DNA of the tech industry seems to be baked to hate advertising and also hate paying for content. That just isn’t sustainable.

    @Brandon, we’re working on some things that will slow down instances of the player running in background tabs. I think that’s a nice mix of letting advertisers experiment but only making it work on the active page and not sucking up CPUs on pages you aren’t looking at.

    @Mitch, I love that angle. Think about advertising being part of the DOM and manipulating the whole thing :)

  • Darren

    Ryan, the problem is that ads (not necessarily Flash but regularly) are often deliberately obnoxious to get the user’s attention, obscure content (sometimes overlaying the whole page), are poorly written (eg. memory leaks) and can increase page load time by 10x or more. Are users meant to believe that if they stop using ad blockers, advertising companies will fix all these issues? How about the online advertising industry develops a code of conduct that recitifes these issues (maximum file size, memory usage, does not obscure content, etc)? Until then, I’ll continue to use ABP and FlashBlock (even though I’m a Flex dev).

  • http://www.marktion.com Ivan

    I agree. Leave the user in control and everything will be OK.

    Even if the user normally might be interested in an ad, he probably won’t interact with an intrusive ad just out of spite… At least that’s the way I react