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Mark Zuckerberg
‘If no one finds a better way, Mark Zuckerberg will end up richer and more powerful.’ Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters
‘If no one finds a better way, Mark Zuckerberg will end up richer and more powerful.’ Photograph: Stephen Lam/Reuters

Adblocking is helping the digital sharks eat the minnows – what’s the solution?

This article is more than 7 years old
Andrew Brown
If no one finds a better way to moderate the conflict between advertisers and net users the likes of Mark Zuckerberg will get richer as small sites are crushed

I started using an adblocker almost before they existed because I dislike distractions when I am reading. The early Norwegian web browser Opera did almost everything better and faster than its more famous rivals: it was the first to have tabbed browsing, which was why I switched to it. Then I discovered what it called “element hiding”, which meant you could nuke particular areas of a web page. In particular, I could kill advertisements that had animated gifs.

Nothing would any longer squirm in one corner of my eye while I was trying to read text. I could read faster and with more concentration. You didn’t need to think about making the choice. As soon as it was possible, it was obvious.

But now what had been a secret known only to nerds has moved into the mainstream. Adblocking is available for every browser, and the take-up is explosive, especially among young people. The most recent report predicts that 30% of British internet users will have taken it up by the end of the year, but among younger and savvier users the figure is already much higher. An estimated 47% of 18- to 24-year-olds in the UK are already blocking ads.

The culture secretary, John Whittingdale, has described adblocking as “a modern-day protection racket”, and promises round-table discussions on the issue. “If people don’t pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist,” he said. But it’s hard to see where this resounding platitude will get us. Adblocking software provides a service that people overwhelmingly want and for which they might even pay.

Indeed there are people making money already. It’s just that they are charging the advertisers not to be blocked. That is the business model of Eyeo, a German company that produces one of the most widely used programs. According to the Financial Times, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all paid up rather than have their ads blocked. This model may also have been adopted by the mobile network 3, which has announced plans to block adverts on its network, except for those it chooses to let through. I would have thought this was a pretty dangerous precedent for a network operator to set – if it is technically capable of censoring adverts, then there is all sorts of other content that governments might want taken off the airwaves, too. Nonetheless, the combination of consumer demand and the increasing desperation of the ad industry offers a tempting opportunity for profit in an industry not famous for its ethics.

In a similar vein, the Chinese web giant Alibaba owns the most popular mobile browser in India, which comes with adblocking already turned on. In all these cases, the sharks are consuming the minnows of the business. The strong get stronger and the weak get weaker. The giants of the internet advertising business are Facebook and Google, which have about 85% of the business between them, and which are also the hardest to block. The weakest parties might seem to be the newspapers, but there is actually a tier below us, of all the smaller news sites run for and by enthusiasts, which are being crushed by the collapse in revenue.

Take graphic cards, a subject of compelling interest to gamers. One site specialising in them, Guru3D, gets about 4.5m hits a month, a figure that was about the same in 2014. But its revenue halved between October 2014 and October 2015, in large part because its readership is drawn from the kind of people who knew about adblockers early. Now the problem spreads. The Toast, an occasionally hilarious site for sharp feminism, is also appealing for donations to make up for the damage caused by adblockers.

The most respectable answer to the problem is that advertisements need to become more interesting and compelling. This is extremely unlikely to happen, though. To make anything interesting and compelling is highly skilled labour – let alone something that is trying to take another person’s money.

One thing that does make ads more engaging is when the advertiser already knows that you want a product quite like what they’re selling. That knowledge is what makes Google rich. The text ads on Google can afford to look dull because you are actually looking for them. But if you’re not looking for something to buy, tracked advertising is like being followed around by a horde of intrusive chuggers.

In the end, there are two great pressures on the market: advertisers want to sell, and we don’t want to be sold to. There has to be some way to make money from moderating this conflict, though so far the only people to have found one are a few of the adblocking companies. If no one finds a better way, Mark Zuckerberg will end up far richer, and far more powerful, than Bill Gates ever was.

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