The moral dilemma of ad blocking

A few years ago, I had visited (for reasons that need not be discussed here) an e-commerce website specializing in lingerie. I did not think much about it till a week later, I was making a presentation to some colleagues and had to open up a web-page to show some content. And on the centre of the screen was an ad from the lingerie website, with obviously a few photos displaying the latest designs. Suffice to say that it was an extremely embarrassing moment. It was then I realized that every time I opened any web page, there were ads of that website – it was almost as if the site was stalking me! 

The other day, I was searching for air fares for Mumbai to Goa and for the next several days, I was bombarded with ads about Goa. Whenever I visit Facebook, I am bound to find an ad that has a special offer for Tata company employees. Initially, it was amusing and interesting that the ads were customized to my requirements. Soon, it became obvious that who I was and what I was doing on the web was known to every site I visited. Then came the next big wave in intrusive advertising – videos that began to play automatically. Not only were they consuming bandwidth for something that I had no interest watching, they were also highly distracting to the actual purpose why I was visiting that page.

Now imagine all these issues but on a much smaller screen that we use a lot more and where data (cellular) connectivity is much more expensive. A recent test done by the New York Times showed that the home pages of several major media outlets loaded much faster and with less data downloads when ad-blocker apps were used. For instance, the Boston.com site was only 4 MB and took eight seconds to load with a blocker whereas it measured 19.4 MB and took 39 seconds to load. The NYTimes.com website itself improved from 3.7 MB (7 seconds) to 2 MB (4 seconds) with the use of an ad blocker app. Ad blockers were also seen to have improved battery life of the phone, yielding a 21% improvement.

Given these results and our own experiences, it would appear that using ad-blockers is a no-brainer. Yet, the recent update to Apple’s mobile operating system that enabled ad-blocker apps has led to a major debate about the ethics of blocking. Those who oppose the blockers point out that many websites are able to provide free news and content to customers because of revenues from advertising. Therefore, blocking ads would be akin to killing free content. That argument is not without merit. Media, whether it is radio, print or television, has always been subsidized – in part or fully – by advertising revenues. Therefore, why this sudden uproar against advertising?

The difference with online or mobile advertising is of course that they have become exceedingly intrusive. And this is perhaps where the content publishers have let the ball drop. In a bid to maximize revenue per click (or page visit), they have given up control over the customer experience. Would a newspaper fill 80% of its front page with ads and keep just one news item or would a television channel broadcasts news for just 12 minutes each hour? Unlikely. Yet, 80% of a news site home page (by file size and loading time) is ads and trackers. 

This extreme of unfettered advertising has come face to face with the other extreme of blockers that, like sledgehammers, kill all ads in their path. This will only lead to destruction of value for content providers and their customers. A reasonable middle path would be for publishers to focus on the experience of content consumption on their sites, and that includes how and which ads are served to customers. And, for ad blockers to build enough intelligence to differentiate between “good” ads from the intrusive ones. It was this moral dilemma and the hope that a better solution can be found that caused Marco Arment, the developer of the best-seller Peace app to pull it from the App Store.

Meanwhile, the war continues. Some websites and videos do not open now unless the ad blockers are turned off – thereby forcing customers to view ads if they want to consume free content. Others are taking a more considerate position, politely requesting customers who are using ad blockers to sign up to a subscription package. 

I know where my sympathies lie. I am willing to pay for content, but I don’t ever want that lingerie ad on my browser again.

Srinivasa Addepalli is the founder of GlobalGyan, a management education firm and a visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad and NMIMS. He was earlier Chief Strategy Officer at Tata Communications. Twitter: @addepalli