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by JoshTriplett 3661 days ago

> 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.

2 comments

manigandham 3661 days ago

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.

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idlewords 3661 days ago

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.

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manigandham 3661 days ago

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.

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JoshTriplett 3661 days ago

> 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.

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manigandham 3661 days ago

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.

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lostlogin 3661 days ago

>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.

Is it? Step back from the Internet. How many people keep things laden with adverts? Cars, magazine and appliances come covered in advertising crap. Better quality things suffer a less from this. We throw things away that are covered with adverts, or at a minimum pull them off. Things that come as they are, unadulterated, are things I place a higher value on. By and large adverts mark things out as cheap. I may be different to others in this regard but I like to pay more, lose the crap and that be it.

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roymurdock 3661 days ago

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.

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JoshTriplett 3661 days ago

> What could be more user-friendly than an ad disguised as an article?

An actual article. It's not an "ad" or "submarine content" if it's a legitimate product review or similar.

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mancerayder 3661 days ago

So user-friendly, that the mistrust of the Internet is probably higher than ever [1]. Sometimes it's legitimately hard to tell what is real, and what is an ad, whether it's some website about some health concern (my favorite BS ones), some tech review site, or god knows what else. And as a discerning, analytical reader with a scientific mindset, I've trained myself to do my own research via studies and reputable sources (health) or even message forums (tech).

The user-friendliness of the ad industry presently is somewhat terrifying to me, if I'm honest.

1 - I can't back that up. :-) But why would I bother, when I can just state it, like one of those 'Top 3 Tablets [whose manufacturers that paid us ]' or 'Glowing Review of New Macbook [ with softball criticisms] '?

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benplumley 3661 days ago

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.