Image by Audun Rikardsen

In order to save money on your appendicitis operation would you buy a scalpel, rent an operating room, download an anatomy manual, and try to do it yourself? That’s what online publishers do every day trying to resolve their ad-blocking problems.

If you are reading this, you belong to the minority for whom ad-blocking has become either a problem or an opportunity. Most people aren’t like you, they still neglect the thing.

The question is whether you — and chances are, many people you personally know — belong to the “early adopter” or — even worse — the “innovator” type. Innovators took us to where we are now. Early adopters will take us farther. These two classes of people differ from each other more than each one of them differs from the mainstream who hasn’t even realized this as an issue yet.

It is a Rocket Science

Ad-blocking is really bad these days. Ad revenue losses have become obvious to most publishers. Anti-ad-blocking is building up muscle but slowly and without finesse. Even when applied, ad-blocking resolving software can’t really tell you to what extent the problem was suppressed. Even when directly asked, most counter-ad-blockers can’t tell you which blocked ads should be re-inserted by force or which kind of diplomacy towards user-blockers should be applied and when.

Running anti-ad-block measures often results in one of several different outcomes:

Some users who previously blocked ads stop blocking following the publisher’s entreaties or threats to turn off the content. A portion of those users remain on the same utility level — their overall usefulness to advertised companies does not change. Another portion of users become less useful (for example, they may feel certain annoyance towards the publisher). And, the third portion has an increased utility level because people belonging to this tier still block other websites and generally see much fewer ads which makes their mind “cleaner” and their attention more valuable. Some removed ads get forcefully re-inserted. While basic impression reporting may return to benchmarks close to the pre-ad-blocking era, actual utility mix is as complicated as described in item # 1 above. The overall website view-stats go south. All anti-blocking techniques work that direction only. By using a counter-block, a publisher either makes it harder to reach the content or annoys people who are already frustrated. Of course, the improved financial health of a publisher — the founding goal of ad-block resolvers — will lead to better content quality and higher quantity which, in its turn, will take Alexa ranking and other indexes to new highs as well. An immediate drop in stats may have its immediate consequences, especially for large publishers. Some people argue that “useless” visitors should be cut off anyway — just to reduce maintenance and operating costs — but I suppose it is next to impossible to protect such statements with actual accounting figures. These days, most technical costs are very much scaled. Reduced number of visitors results in less exposure in social media. Users who block ads are expected to have a higher average IQ and, therefore, higher influence in SMM terms. Turning them off by counter-ad-blocking may have an impact that needs to be measured. Anti-ad-blocking analytics are already a very difficult thing, and the need for proper tracking in social media sources does make this a rocket science.

There is no doubt that anti-blockers add value and increase publishers’ financials. The degree of impact, however, lies in a much wider range than most people expect.

Anti-blockers are often described as having a two-part focus: re-insertion and pay/talk walls. The complexity considered above, however, offers to see anti-blockers in a more conventional way — in terms of analytics. Of course, the final judge is a year-end financial statement of a given publisher. But, not everyone can afford long-term testing and so smart real-time analytics are the key here.

By the end of the day, every publisher on Earth should have such software installed. The question though is: what will be the distribution among providers and across which types of settings. Along with all dimensions mentioned above, publishers may set the protection level from zero to infinity. Thus, it is unlikely that there will be any two anti-blocker setups taking the same form.

But, who will help publishers make the proper adjustments? Analysts — that’s who. Naked software won’t really help you, especially if you are a middle-sized publisher. A preliminary report from Oriel, for example, is a document of dozens of pages. One can’t really comprehend it on his or her own because reading multi-dimensional streams of anti-ad-blocking analytics is a new and tough job that only a rare professional can handle. So, publishers, you should really try to have your provider do a large chunk of the thinking for you, at least during the first few months.

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Let me address to anti-blockers now.

Avoiding Getting Lost in Marketing Translation

Anti-blocking providers haven’t hurried to market such individual services yet. But, the time may have come already. The passionate technologists, the curious, the large fish have all pretty much settled up with counter-ad-blocking by now. How do anti-blockers get to the rest of the world?

Counter-ad-blockers rarely manage to clearly articulate their marketing message. Some even spend money on schizophrenic activities such as delivering the “ad-blocking harms the Internet mechanics” message to the broader public. The industry is very young, its participants are small new companies. Most of them haven’t developed their marketing to the threshold where you soberly recognize that most people aren’t like you.

Despite sounding obvious, making one’s messaging coherent to others who think differently is a very difficult achievement by itself. In an industry where three strata of players stand next to each other — ad-blockers, anti-ad-blocker, anti-ad-blocker killers — it becomes a truly herculean task.

Working in an entrenched ad-blocking environment — which is imminent — is the entire paradigm shift for publishers. One can’t just say “counter-ad-blocking is better than no counter ad-blocking”. It’s a bit less black-and-white than that. Paradoxically, the broader the ad-blocking issue becomes, the less it becomes required to mention it directly.

Out of necessity, anti-blockers are getting so much more sophisticated in analytics that they have started to reach into the traditional player’s territory, well outside of the scope of ad-blocking. Yes, I dare to point at Google Analytics. Of course, any directly marketable comparison is yet so radically outside everybody’s comfort zone. So, being an analytics provider by heart, an honest anti-blocker has yet to act evasively in its marketing.

However, the foundation for a long-term marketing positioning should be made now, with no delays. Anti-blockers don’t need to listen to their inner selves who are always lying. Publisher’s native line of thinking isn’t touching or crossing ad-blocking or anti-blocking. It never was, it never will. These words just make them sad. Even less, they care about monstrous engineering underworlds of the ad-blocking arms race.