Boiling the Frog

If you put a frog into really hot water, it is said, it will leap right out. If, on the other hand, you put it into some cold water and then very slowly heat it up to boiling point, by the time the frog realises it is too hot, its capacity to act has gone.

It’s not a particularly nice image. But it is often used as a metaphor for the failure of people to react to or even to be aware of threats that occur gradually. Can we apply it to the hot topic of the month: the inexorable rise of ad blocking?

Few can be unaware of the increasing annoyance felt by many internet and Smartphone users about the high volume of advertising messages being addressed to their devices. Or of the very significant growth in the number of people installing ad blockers on their devices to stop the deluge. But there is little sign that the volume of digital advertising is falling – or will do so in the future.

An ad blocker is very easy to install. It is, in effect, a sort of firewall which sits between a web browser (like Google Chrome, Firefox, Apple iOS and Internet Explorer) and known ad servers (a list of which is kept up to date by a large and active open source community). Once in place, it will block most kinds of ad from appearing on the user’s device.

PageFair (an ad serving company that claims to be able to circumvent ad blockers) notes that more than 200 million desktop/laptop users and more than 400 million mobile users - around a fifth of all Smartphones - block ads. Consumers in Asia were particularly likely to install mobile ad blockers (in March 2016, according to PageFair, the Asia Pacific region made up 55% of global Smartphone users and 93% of ad blocking mobile browser usage).

The phenomenon has grown rapidly in recent years: for example, the number of monthly active users of major desktop and laptop browser extensions which block ads grew five-fold between 2012 and 2015. Notably, websites appealing to younger, male and more technically savvy audiences are more significantly impacted than average.

Survey data from several countries show that as many as a third of online users have now installed ad-blocking software onto their devices. eMarketer polled US internet users in June 2016 and found that more than a quarter of them had installed ad blockers on their devices. According to one estimate, this led to $24 billion of ad revenue being ‘lost’ to publishers in 2015.

Digital marketers commonly target people based on their browsing behaviour. They might, for example, want to talk to people they think most likely to be in the market to test drive one of their cars or to book a luxury holiday in Indonesia. The marketer and his agency may decide that this is best achieved by serving messages to anybody who has visited any of a number of car (or luxury holiday) sites in the past month. Or anybody who has searched for related words or phrases.

This can work very effectively. But, when multiplied by all the advertisers who want to reach an individual, it can use up a lot of internet bandwidth, it can irritate users trying to access content and it can even become a little spooky.

Advertising, according to a study of major websites by Secret Media, can represent some 9% of the space on a web page and 54% of its load time. As many as 53 third parties are, on average, involved in the act of loading a web page, as they all seek to collect data about the user. This is an important issue in countries (or regions of countries) where the internet and mobile infrastructure is still being developed. Installing ad blockers improves page speed and reduces bandwidth consumption.

Coming between the user and the content he is seeking can be annoying pop-up ads, “stickies”, wobbling banners, non-skippable video and more. Much of it will be irrelevant (who wants to take a holiday to somewhere they have just returned from or to buy a new car they have just bought?). And spooky in the sense that so many people seem to know what you are doing. The incentive to install ad blockers is clearly very high – and it really is easy to do.

So what is to be done? Some publishers are resorting to ‘ad re-insertion’, whereby they deliver advertising to users with ad blockers installed by somehow by-passing them. Others prevent those with ad blockers installed from accessing their content, insisting that they ‘white list’ their site (e.g. Forbes magazine and ITV in the UK).

In Sweden, a large group of publishers have agreed to jointly block the blockers in August of this year, insisting that they either pay for content or uninstall their blockers. A group of French publishers in April 2016 piloted a number of different ways to persuade people to switch off their ad blockers or white list their sites.

A lot has been written about how publishers should simply limit the amount of advertising they carry, while advertisers should get better at targeting, should create more engaging content, should limit tagging (which slows web page loading time) and so on. Perhaps this will happen.

Meanwhile, the frog is getting warmer and warmer…