UK culture secretary John Whittingdale gave a speech declaring that adblocking is piracy.
Letâs be honest: there are some people who adamantly refuse advertising. Just refuse. They donât want to be bothered. It annoys them. It ruins their âuser experience,â or whatever other self-involved phrase has been invented. Theyâve been skipping ads since the days of the VCR, and theyâll always block them.
But itâs not piracy. If I toss the Sunday inserts in a newspaper without even glancing at them, am I a pirate? If I go to the bathroom during a commercial, am I infringing copyright somehow? If I willfully ignore two pages of ads in the middle of a comic book, have I just stolen the artwork?
The thing is, there is another reason for adblocking: over a decade of bad behavior on the part of advertisers.
Since the early 2000â˛s when online ads came to fruition, advertisers have displayed a constant disregard for those who would have to see the ads. They sent out Flash ads with malicious code, which helped form the backbone of many botnets and DDOS attacks. They pioneered the autoplay ad, otherwise known as âJESUS CHRIST MY EARS WHICH TAB IS DOING THAT?â They put inappropriate ads everywhere, some borderline NSFW and some just straight up âCALL ME AND FUCK TONIGHTâ with tits in your face. They tracked our online behavior, which sites we visited, how long we were there, and compiled that data in big banks that were ripe for hackers and law enforcement alike. When mobile caught on, they didnât give one red shit on just how much battery life their ads consumed, how much expensive metered data they devoured, how many processing cycles were monopolized.
In short, online ads were a âLord of the Fliesâ bonanza. Users fought back: they blocked the ads.
When adblockers started to catch on, panic began to rise. It came to a head not long ago with the release of the first adblocking apps on iOS, Since iPhones and iPads were considered the default consumption device, online media went into a frenzy to declare the impending death of their sites at the hands of mean, nasty, good-for-nothing audiences who wanted everything for free.
It hasnât happened, but they did a good Chicken Little impression none the less.
But I have one simple solution that will bring back some of those users who blocked ads just to save themselves from the onslaught: clearly state your ad policy on your website.
Are you going to vet your ads so nothing harmful or inappropriate gets through? Say so. Are you going to disallow autoplay, Flash, or anything else that consumes inordinate amounts of data, could be potentially dangerous, or impacts the audienceâs system performance? Tell them that. Are you going to do what television, radio and print has done since time immemorial, and take responsibility for the ads your web site shows? Put it in writing.
Audiences donât block ads solely because they want something for nothing. They donât trust ad networks and ad providers anymore. That trust was absolutely destroyed during a period where ad networks treated their recipients like garbage. Itâs going to have to be rebuilt, bit by bit, by the web sites that show those ads.
âBut itâs hard! It takes time! Itâs expensive! I canât control my ad network!â
Sorry, but the onus isnât on the audience to deal with those things. You helped break it; youâll have to fix it. Youâre going to have to show that you can be trusted to deliver advertising in your siteâs content that isnât going to set my computer on fire, get me fired from an office or violate my privacy. If you canât do that, then you donât value your audience.
Calling them âpiratesâ and stamping your feet isnât the solution. Rebuilding the relationship with the audience you depend on for your financial well being is.