[manigandham]

There's a difference between the formats and the distribution systems.

Content has always been a good marketing tool, we're just starting to see a lot more of it with publishers setting up their own "agencies" to sell pieces written by the same teams but for advertisers. Some are actually really great (Netflix stories for example).

When it comes to distribution, there is just a lot that needs to be done for advertising. Part of the big draw for digital/online is all the data you can collect and analyze and use to optimize. Publishers usually do not have the technical resources to build this or manage and integrate with all the other thousands of systems that advertisers use. It's almost always worth it to have a vendor that specializes in the infrastructure so publishers can just focus on their own business.

However, because adblockers mostly work at the network interface level, the typical 3rd party javascript tag approach is very easy to disable, and self-published native content by publishers using the existing content management system is a good workaround. It's more of a stop gap then a long term approach though.

[JoshTriplett]

> However, because adblockers mostly work at the network interface level, the typical 3rd party javascript tag approach is very easy to disable, and self-published native content by publishers using the existing content management system is a good workaround. It's more of a stop gap then a long term approach though.

The major adblocker filter lists tend to quickly add filters for "native" ads on any site with a non-trivial number of users.

Rather than moving to native ads, start planning today for how you could do without ads entirely. If that doesn't turn up any answers, you should worry about your future.

[manigandham]

Adblockers are just software and there are already dozens of ways to work around this. It's not the end of the world but a new paradigm that requires more work than before. Part of the benefit is that it's a reset in the industry that should get rid of some of the bad vendors and help improve the experience by showing advertisers that consumers do care about UX and choice.

Advertising will always be around though. No need to worry about that future. People want content but they don't want to pay, and advertising is a great model that works well for the vast majority. In fact digital advertising today is bigger, stronger and better than ever.

It's the legacy tech, formats and thinking that are broken, but progress is being made and everything will get better soon enough.

[idlewords]

How is digital advertising 'better than ever' when everyone seems to agree that the situation is untenable?

I admire your optimism that putting consumers and advertisers in a directly adversarial relationship (by forcing them into an arms race around blocking) will somehow make everything great, but I have a hard time sharing it.

[manigandham]

Hey Maciej - maybe this will go better than our twitter exchange a few months back.

This is a much longer discussion than fit for HN but digital advertising is doing better in pretty much every metric: There's more time spent with ads, deeper engagements, more conversions/ROI and better formats than ever before. Take a look at any of the big apps and platforms that have billions of interactions that happen every day for the data to back this up. Adblocking, even at the scale it is today, is still a small percentage of the entire market.

I'm not sure who you're referring to with "everyone" but the situation is definitely not untenable. It's just outdated. Advertising is always a relationship between the advertiser, publisher and consumer but the consumer was never really considered in the past because they had no power or way to provide feedback. Adblocking is changing that dynamic and giving power to the people while letting advertisers know that they need to actually consider the user experience.

Since the advertising model isn't going to go away, the natural evolution is that the implementation and approach will change to create better experiences that fit with the way people consume media along with the expectations around privacy, relevance and value. The market will also re-calibrate and rise up from the artificially low rates of today.

This is a massive industry so it won't be quick and there will be lots of pain in the short term. No way around that, but progress is happening and things will absolutely get better. It might be a hated industry (and for good reason) but there are plenty of good people out there working hard and doing the right thing.

[JoshTriplett]

> Since the advertising model isn't going to go away

There are plenty of people who would like it to, and personally I hope they win. With sufficiently widespread and robust use of adblocking technology, perhaps advertising will become sufficiently unworkable to go away entirely.

[manigandham]

You've said the same thing several times in all the advertising related threads. While I understand some of the sentiment, let me be as blunt as possible: Advertising will never go away.

The fundamental model of advertising giving free access to content is great and works for pretty much everyone. It's fast, simple, egalitarian, requires no commitment and is very scalable.

Adblocking tech will never cover 100% of ads, there will always be workarounds and other developments to either serve ads or refuse adblocking users. With all the adblocking growth we've seen so far, it's still a tiny part of the ad market. Whatever we've lost in adblocked impressions has been more than made up for in all the mobile apps and platforms that take up more and more of people's time.

If you really want to pay for content then there are increasingly more options being offered, but this does not need to be mutually exclusive of ads. It's just a different option and more choice is the real solution.

[roymurdock]

Ads will never disappear entirely, because at a basic level, they are really just packets of information. Some are more obnoxious, targeted, and/or dangerous than others, but seeing as how the internet was created to facilitate the distribution and dissemination of information, selfish ads will always find a way to latch into and ride along on more useful and/or altruistic information.

I'd rather live in a world where billboards/TV commercials serve as clearly delineated frames for ads to exist in, rather than the world we are moving towards, where essays and "news" articles hide behind a facade of objectivity while subtly promoting some sponsor's content.

But submarines/native content is the logical end of all freely-published syndicated content on the web, given the arms race between ad blockers and ad networks. What could be more user-friendly than an ad disguised as an article?

Time to start paying for good content - the free ride for us common consumers is over.

[benplumley]

Advertising is doing 'better than ever' because for every x% increase in adblocking users, the adverts seen by the remaining people become more than x% more predatory. You can tell that a market is healthy and sustainable by looking at its bottom line.

See also: Cable TV.

[chris_wot]

Digital advertising is genuinely not good for anyone. I now work at a major media organization and the other day I was forced to install uBlock Origin on their news desk because they were viewing their own paper's online edition and doing digital story editing, and the ads were preventing the stories from being written because they were crashing their preferred browser.

I told the lady she'd better not tell anyone if she wanted to get her work done and allow stories to be published on the same website that serves those same ads.

[intrasight]

What is a "native" ad?

[shermozle]

It used to be called "advertorial" or "special advertising feature". It's an ad disguised as content.

Done well, everyone wins: good content that pushes a message for the advertiser. It's not done well very often. Quartz has done it well a fair amount.

[intrasight]

Ok - I just wanted to verify the same. So what technology, besides AI beyond the means of our browser's JS engine, could filter out ads that are just inline HTML? I ask this because it seems likely that we'll soon be "back to the future" with "advertorials" and "sponsors" etc. and that it will be a way out of this dilemma for publishers.

[roymurdock]

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html