Advertisers admit causing uptick of ad blocking

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in internet on (#RBRR)
story imageThe Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:

"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience".

"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty"

"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."

The IAB goes on to introduce new advertising principles called L.E.A.N. (Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive ads) as a start.

This is a fundamental shift in vantage point for the Ad Tech world. In 2013, LUMApartners famously created its first LUMAscape capturing all of the fragmented, disparate Ad Tech players involved in the processing of serving up an ad to a consumer. It's an industry organized around itself, not around the needs of the consumer. Thus we see retargeting ads for sweaters we've already bought, video ads that auto-play with sound, and pop-ups that take over your screen.

https://marketoonist.com/2015/10/ad-blocking.html

About Time; The Web Is Nearly Unusable (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-10-24 01:48 (#REVH)

It has gotten SO much worse over the last year or two. I spend much of my browsing time on mobile, which until recently had been somewhat of a refuge. Now it's MULTIPLE screen takeovers and autoplay videos with sound on mobile sites, and jiggles and refreshes and jerks as pages try to load, complete with additional takeovers that pop up after you've finally begun reading. Infuriating.

Turning off Javascript (selectively if you can run a Mozilla browser) and turning off images entirely seem like reliable old standbys that help save sanity. I appreciate decent page formatting but 93% of the time I just want to read the damned text.

As to the points above about ad blocking locally hosted ads, it's an arms race certainly. But sites need to track the ads in some way, and most of the time those conventions (naming or script related if not 3rd party hosted) will be discernible in the HTML or perhaps the content of the files or data passed by URL/cookie/etc. Determining the naming or retrieval scheme used by a given site shouldn't be harder than bypassing something like DVD encryption, at worst. It should be manageable at least in the near term.
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