| This is based on adsense partner network earnings, which is a small section of the total online advertising market. I don't think you can reach conclusions about online advertising in general (which is all affected by adblocking) from this. Adblock may be playing a role, but I don't think that's what this data shows. Several reasons: _ 1 the centralization of the web. Adsense was built for the long tail web. Today's web is much more centralized with more impressions going to fewer, bigger sites. Google themselves play a few roles here. They run some of the big sites sucking up the traffic. Their search results are increasingly directing people to the big sites. Fewer blogs more circles and tweets. The data cited is from Google's quarterly results. Taken as a whole the data seems to support this theory. Q1-2014 'Sites Revenues' : $10.47 billion, a 21% increase over Q1-2013
Q1-2014 'Partner Revenues' : $3.40 billion, a 4% increase over Q1-2013
Q1-2013 'Sites Revenues' : $8.64 billion, a 18% increase over Q1-2012
Q1-2013 'Partner Revenues' : $3.26 billion billion, a 12% increase over Q1-2012
4% increase in Network Revenues.
Overall, the growth in ad revenue actually accelerated from 19% to 22%. The growth just shifted from the partner network to Google's own network. Both are similarly affected by adblocking. There isn't an overall slowdown.- 2. The market adsense ads are a part of is competitive, much more so than search. For search ads, Google's reach, platform quality and ad quality is best by far. There is no competition. For content network ads, Google's inventory (the sites displaying adsense ads) and the platform is nothing special. Competition is growing. Social media (including Google's own sites) advertising is the biggest new source of competition. In-app ads are anther. Those 'you might also like' content recommendation ads you might find on news sites on are another source are another growing segment 9and an important way of picking up that one weird trick for flatter bellies). Facebook is the real elephant in this room. Facebook ads work. The platform is improving and marketers are learning how to use it. They have an enormous inventory. They have user data enabling really powerful (or scary, depending on your perspective) targeting. Since so many Facebook users check in multiple times per day, campaigns can target (and report on) daily impressions and such. Facebook ads work in ways other ads don't. A lot of ad dollars are flowing into Facebook, some would have gone to adsense. _ 3 "content network" ads on adsense are in the more direct competition for ad dollars with the offline world than most online ads. This is a volatile market segment. Blue chip advertisers can cut 7-8 figure budgets to zero in a bad year (like 2011). On a smaller scale, it's still a volatile market I'm not saying that adblocking doesn't matter. I'm sure it does. But these are two noisy datasets you are looking at. You need to correlate different things to make this point. Maybe earning per 1m pageviews for some site. |