Are you tired of ads for things you absolutely don’t want of need interrupting your favorite news or entertainment TV shows? Almost one-third of every hour is taken up with ads.
Rather than watching TV programs live are you recording them and looking at them later so you can skip the ads?
When you’re trying to read something online do the pop-up ads that are often very difficult to get rid of interrupt your reading and train of thought? To get rid of one recently, I had to close down my computer and re-start it twice. This certainly doesn’t encourage me to go back to that web site.
Are you worried that the delivery of ads online is slowing down your access to information and entertainment, particularly on mobile devices?
Yes, we know that ads pay for a large share of the production of content. Image producer activities are on the content producer side of the business. Thus, they may be more inclined to put up with the inconvenience of the ads, and the time wasted, in order to insure that there is some money out there to pay for our services.
However, the general population that earns its living in other ways may not be so tolerant.
Ad blocking on TV
By 2014 many DVR programs such as
Windows Media Center,
SageTV and
MythTV had the capability to skip commercials segments in recorded TV broadcasts after installing third-party add-ons such as
DVRMSToolbox,
Comskip and
ShowAnalyzer, which use various advanced techniques to locate the commercial segments in the video files and save their locations to text files. The text files can also be fed into programs such as
MEncoder or
DVRMSToolboxGUI which can delete the commercial segments from the recorded video files.
Digital Ad Blocking
A new
report from Adobe shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking digital ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. Although the 198 million monthly active users in Q2 2015 represents only 6% of the global internet population, ad blocking is estimated to cost over $21B in 2015, which is 14% of the global ad spend.
Adblock Plus has 50 million users and it forces companies like Google and Microsoft to pay a fee to make sure Adblock doesn't block their ads.
As long as customers are “paying per click” ad blocking may not be costing advertisers any real money, (just reducing the revenue the Internet service provider might have earned), but it does make it more difficult for advertiser to get their message in front of potential customers. Google is already
losing 10% of its ad revenue to ad blockers. As a result, the advertisers run the same ads more and more times in more and more places hoping something will stick.
iPhone users who update to the iOS9 operating system can block ads seen through the phone's Safari web browser. Many think Apple’s goal is to make its paid apps more attractive and make it harder for publishers to fund their content production with advertising. Apple makes money when people get their digital stuff from the App Store. It makes almost no money from the web. The appeal is obvious — faster loads, lower data use, fewer annoyances.
This will not be all-out ad blocking on Apple devices. First, the user has to be using Safari on an Apple device. Second, the user has to opt-out of ads. Third, the opt-out process will likely be granular, with individual settings to block specific types of ad formats like pop-ups, pre-rolls, and so forth. Already Germany has a higher rate of blocking than the U.S. and UK. 25% to 30% for gaming sites.
Those who want to better understand how ad blocking is likely to affect the future of publishing may want to listen to Joshua Benton’s interview of
Justin Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next on the Nieman Lab website.