Remember back in 2015 and 2016 when the ad industry was in a frenzy over ad blocking?
There was enough hand-wringing to cause collective carpal tunnel.
These days, people don’t talk about ad blocking as much as they used to – it’s hard to get a word in edgewise with so much focus on third-party cookies and signal loss on mobile – but that doesn’t mean that ad blocking isn’t still happening.
In fact, according to Blockthrough’s most recent PageFair report, after declining between 2018 and 2020, ad block rates rose again last year to reach 2018 levels. In 2021, desktop ad blocking increased 5% to 290 million people using ad blockers across the globe.
One reason for the rise is that, after making good faith efforts to mitigate ad blocking between 2016 and 2018, publishers got distracted, says Marty Krátký-Katz, CEO of ad block revenue recovery company Blockthrough, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
“Publishers are under assault from a thousand different directions,” he says.
Although combatting ad blocking was a priority for a time, GDPR came in 2018, followed by Google’s original announcement in early 2020 that third-party cookies were soon (ha) to be phased out in its Chrome browser. Then the pandemic hit, ad prices dipped and publishers started slinging more ads to hit their numbers.
And just like a rising tide lifts all boats, a receding tide grounds all ships. When someone turns on an ad blocker out of frustration, that also affects publishers making an effort to serve up respectful ad experiences.
“If [an] abysmal ad experience makes me turn on an ad blocker,” Krátký-Katz says, “that impacts every publisher, not just the one who actually caused the problem and pushed me over the edge.”
Also in this episode: Quantifying publisher revenue loss from ad blocking, a deep dive on the Acceptable Ads Committee, how Krátký-Katz became a hyperpolyglot (he speaks six languages!) and why ad block walls (you know, those “Looks like you’re using an ad blocker! Uh-oh!” pop-ups) have fallen out of favor.
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