The Advertising Industry is to Blame for Ad Blockers

An incredible question was posed to me the other day - "Have you found a way to get past ad blockers?"

That question really sums up the state of online advertising. My response was simple - "When someone puts a lock on the door to their home, and you knock and no one answers, do you break down the door or find an open window to sneak inside?"

The answer, was of course not. And that really, sums up trying to find a way past an ad blocker. If someone is using an ad blocker, they're essentially sending a signal to every advertiser out there that they're just not interested. They don't want to receive ads. If you do somehow find a way to get past their ad blocker, the only response you're going to get from them is that of hatred and annoyance.

And we can't blame consumers for using ad blockers, just how we can't blame Google for considering to put an in-built ad blocker into a future version of Chrome.

The only blame, lies with the advertising industry. With the intrusive ads, the ads that auto-play audio, the ads that auto-play video, the ads that expand to fill up the screen, make it impossible to navigate websites, the ads that bait users to click them, that take over the mobile screen, that use up precious data on mobile plans - they're the ones to blame.

For all the "innovation" advertisers are platforms thought they were doing, they were simply pushing users further and further away - to the point where estimates show that roughly half a billion devices on the planet use ad blockers.

The rise of ad block should serve as a warning signal to advertisers, to platforms and to websites. Yes, plenty of users install ad blockers because they don't want to be tracked, they like to have an element of security when browsing the internet, but the majority of users install ad blockers because of interruptions, drops in speed and being exposed to far too many ads.

In an effort to make advertising "experience" focused, advertisers forget that those experiences are meant to be designed on their own platforms like their websites and social pages, and not via ad networks and third-party platforms.

There is no stronger signal about advertising from a user than to say that they simply don't want to receive advertising at all, and the advertising industry's response to that has been far from improving the quality of ads, and the media industry's response to that has been far from removing intrusive ad formats.

It only goes to show how stubborn advertisers can be, that the only hope to achieve better advertising standards for users is for Chrome, the most popular browser on the planet, to talk about using an in-built ad blocker that will automatically not serve ad formats that are intrusive or disrupt the browsing experience.

And if blocking ads seems counterintuitive for a company like Google, that makes 86% of its revenue from online advertising, it's essentially a move from them to ensure that users don't adopt far more aggressive ad blockers - and lose out on the revenue completely.

All of this could have been avoided, but greed is short-sighted. And in advertising, where marketers are engrossed with taking up as much space and being as loud as possible, what other outcome did we really expect?