Well, that took a while. A budding romance between the ad industry and its self-appointed watchdogs at AdBlock parent company Eyeo has come to an end. The startuphas been told that it will not be receiving its tickets to the world’s biggest online advertising conference. In other words, the world’s most important ad blocker will not be a part of the conversation about how to reform ads. This is an unfortunate situation — but understandable, that’s for sure.
For most people, the surprising part of this headline is in the subtext: AdBlock was going to be allowed to go to the advertising industry’s big con in the first place? That’s like Netflix inviting VPN companies to come be a part of their distribution plans — they wouldn’t, unless they were forced to. In this case, advertising was forced to at least consider coming to the table with Eyeo because it was simply losing money — Slate, for instance, estimates about an 8% loss of revenue due to ad-blocking. So the real question here is not, why isn’t AdBlock invited, but why isn’t AdBlock invited now?
We can only speculate as to what’s changed, especially following repeated German rulings that it is allowable to knowingly disrupt an online business and then charge that business to end the disruption. But it’s a simple fact that the ad industry’s hatred for AdBlock is based on principle, not practicality. They call ithighway robbery, and speak about an oncoming “war between engineers.” They are not settling in for a conversation, but for a protracted fight in the courts, the legislature, and the browser itself. Their hatred of AdBlock goes beyond hatred of lost revenue, all the way to the core of Eyeo actually is.
What is a protection racket? Well, technically it has to involve violence, but interpreted slightly more broadly it’s basically this: I’m not allowed to charge you for the service of not intentionally harming you. I’m allowed to organize daily protests outside your business, for example, but I wouldn’t be able to then come to you and explain that I sell a de-activization service that could get rid of those pesky protesters for one or a series of low, low payments. That’s when it becomes a conflict of interest and, in most cases, the situation would be deemed criminal extortion.
But what if the mafia wasn’t going around intimidating innocent store owners, but the world’s most powerful corporations? And what if, instead of keeping any gains for itself, it promised to reinvest those gains in creating a better future for all? What if they even had an implied mission to make themselves obsolete — to fix the world of advertising so that nobody would ever need an AdBlocker ever again? Sounds noble, doesn’t it?
The web’s self-appointed Robin Hood has a fairly convoluted method of adding publishers to its “whitelist,” based on its own determination that the publisher does not push illegitimate or unduly annoying ads. Of these whitelisted companies, only the largest 10% or so, like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, are charged a fee to reach AdBlock users. To Eyeo, this makes them humanitarians only charging those who can afford to pay, while to the ad industry it makes the scheme’s almost unbelievable arrogance all the more obvious.
There’s also the fact that saying, “But we’re not abusing our power!” does not in and of itself prove that the power is legitimate. It’s a familiar mafia tactic to reinvest some gains back into the territory, or claim to, and try to reframe the business as a service that protects and maintains the community.
On the other hand, there are complications. While ad companies have every right to insist that ads be broadcast with the page, there’s question about whether they can equally insist that those ads be displayed with the page. That is to say, I own my computer and my monitor — once information is in those boxes, why shouldn’t I be able to edit it while it’s in there? Nobody would dispute my right to post-process the image by, say, tinting it a certain color at a certain time of day — why can’t I do more robust and specific editing, too? Just because it has a greater monetary impact? Why should that matter to me?
And, on the simplest level, ads suck. We all know this, and that the reason ad suck so much is largely to do with their design, rather than their simple existence. Whatever you think of the legality or ethics of the Eyeo business model, you can’t deny that it has had the effect of reforming advertising, at least on mainstream sites. I myself have unfavorited websites because of auto-playing audio on ads. It’s a real problem, and AdBlock has at least partially shown that it’s willing to compromise a bit on its policies as it works to fix the situation. The implicit challenge is for ad executives to be willing to do the same.
In the end, I come down on Eyeo’s side because of one simple fact: If ad-blocking exists (check), and is having a huge negative effect on internet revenues (check), then we’d better hope that the most powerful ad-blocker starts letting at least some ads through. We might want the body that controls this process to be totally independent, but if it has no stake in either side, it won’t be able to keep either side at the table. In the end, there is simply no way forward except for ad blocking to forcibly reform the ad industry, or for the ad industry to utterly eradicate ad blockers.