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Articles by: "Don Marti"

Advertising | Perspectives

Will the tracker always get through?

(Note: I work for Mozilla. None of this is secret. None of this is Mozilla policy. Not speaking for Mozilla here.)

A big objection to tracking protection is the idea that the tracker will always get through. Some people suggest that as browsers give users more ability to control how their personal information gets leaked across sites, things won’t get better for users, because third-party tracking will just keep up. On this view, today’s easy-to-block third-party cookies will be replaced by techniques such as passive fingerprinting where it’s hard to tell if the browser is succeeding at protecting the user or not, and users will be stuck in the same place they are now, or worse.

I doubt this is the case because we’re playing a more complex game than just trackers vs. users. The game has at least five sides, and some of the fastest-moving players with the best understanding of the game are the ad fraud hackers. Right now ad fraud is losing in some areas where they had been winning, and the resulting shift in ad fraud is likely to shift the risks and rewards of tracking techniques.

Data center ad fraud

Fraudbots, running in data centers, visit legit sites (with third-party ads and trackers) to pick up a realistic set of third-party cookies to make them look like high-value users. Then the bots visit dedicated fraudulent “cash out” sites (whose operators have the same third-party ads and trackers) to generate valuable ad impressions for those sites.

If you wonder why so many sites made a big deal out of “pivot to video” but can’t remember watching a video ad, this is why. Fraudbots are patient enough to get profiled as, say, a car buyer, and watch those big-money ads. And the money is good enough to motivate fraud hackers to make good bots, usually based on real browser code. When a fraudbot network gets caught and blocked from high-value ads, it gets recycled for lower and lower value forms of advertising. By the time you see traffic for sale on fraud boards, those bots are probably only getting past just enough third-party anti-fraud services to be worth running.

This version of ad fraud has minimal impact on real users. Real users don’t go to fraud sites, and fraudbots do their thing in data centers and don’t touch users’ systems. The companies that pay for it are legit publishers, who not only have to serve pages to fraudbots—remember, a bot needs to visit enough legit sites to look like a real user—but also end up competing with ad fraud for ad revenue. Ad fraud has only really been a problem for legit publishers. The adtech business is fine with it, since they make more money from fraud than the fraud hackers do, and the advertisers are fine with it because fraud is priced in, so they pay the fraud-adjusted price even for real impressions.

What’s new for ad fraud

So what’s changing? More fraudbots in data centers are getting caught, just because the adtech firms have mostly been shamed into filtering out the embarassingly obvious traffic from IP addresses that everyone can tell probably don’t have a human user on them. So where is fraud going now? More fraud is likely to move to a place where a bot can look more realistic but probably not stay up as long—your computer or mobile device. Expect ad fraud concealed within web pages, as a payload for malware, and of course in lots and lots of cheesy native mobile apps. Ad fraud makes way more money than cryptocurrency mining, using less CPU and battery.

So the bad news is that you’re going to have to reformat your uncle’s computer a lot this year, because more client-side fraud is coming. Data center IPs don’t get by the ad networks as well as they once did, so ad fraud is getting personal. The good news, is, hey, you know all that big, scary passive fingerprinting that’s supposed to become the harder-to-beat replacement for the third-party cookie? Client-side fraud has to beat it in order to get paid, so they’ll beat it. As a bonus, client-side bots are way better at attribution fraud (where a fraudulent ad gets credit for a real sale) than data center bots.

Users don’t have to get protected from every possible tracking technique in order to shift the web advertising game from a hacking contest to a reputation contest. It often helps simply to shift the advertiser’s ROI from negative-externality advertising below the ROI of positive-externality advertising.

Advertisers have two possible responses to ad fraud: either try to out-hack it, or join the “flight to quality” and cut back on trying to follow big-money users to low-reputation sites in the first place. Hard-to-detect client-side bots, by making creepy fingerprinting techniques less trustworthy, tend to increase the uncertainty of the hacking option and make flight to quality relatively more attractive.

Perspectives

ePrivacy and marketing budgets

This article was originally published on Don Marti’s blog on 16 August 2017

 

As far as I know, there are three ways to match an ad to a user.

User intent: Show an ad based on what the user is searching for. Old-school version: the Yellow Pages.

Context: Show an ad based on where the user is, or what the user is interested in. Old-school versions: highway billboards (geographic context), specialized magazines (interest context).

User identity: Show an ad based on who the user is. Old-school version: direct mail.

Most online advertising is matched to the user based on a mix of all three. And different players have different pieces of the action for each one. For user intent, search engines are the gatekeepers. The other winners from matching ads to users by intent are browsers and mobile platforms, who get paid to set their default search engine. Advertising based on context rewards the owners of reputations for producing high-quality news, information, and cultural works. Finally, user identitynow has a whole Lumascape of vendors in a variety of categories, all offering to help identify users in some way. (the Lumascape is rapidly consolidating, but that’s another story.)

Few of the web ads that you might see today are matched to you purely based on one of the three methods. Investments in all three tend to shift as the available technology, and the prevailing norms and laws, change.

Enough background.

Randall Rothenberg of the IAB is concerned about the proposed ePrivacy Regulation in Europe, and writes,

The basic functionality of the internet, which is built on data exchanges between a user’s computer and publishers’ servers, can no longer be used for the delivery of advertising unless the consumer agrees to receive the ads – but the publisher must deliver content to that consumer regardless.

This doesn’t look accurate. I don’t know of any proposal that would require publishers to serve users who block ads entirely. What Rothenberg is really complaining about is that the proposed regulation would limit the ability of sites and ad intermediaries to match ads to users based on user identity, forcing them to rely on user intent and context. If users choose to block ads delivered from ad servers that use their personal data without permission, then sites won’t be able to refuse to serve them the content, but will be able to run ads that are relevant to the content of the site. As far as I can tell, sites would still be able to pop a “turn off your ad blocker” message in place of a news story if the user was blocking an ad placed purely by context, magazine style.

Privacy regulation is not so much an attack on the basic functionality of the Internet, as it is a shift that lowers the return on investment on knowing who the user is, and drives up the return on investment on providing search results and content. That’s a big change in who gets paid: more money for search and for trustworthy content brands, and less for adtech intermediaries that depend on user tracking.

Advertising: a fair deal for the user?

That depends. Search advertising is clearly the result of a user choice. The user chooses to view ads that come with search results, as part of choosing to do a search. As long as the ads are marked as ads, it’s pretty obvious what is happening.

The same goes for ads placed in context. The advertiser trades economic signal, in the form of costly support of an ad-supported resource, for the user’s attention. This is common in magazine and broadcast advertising, and when you use a site with one of the (rare) pure in-context ad platforms such as Project Wonderful, it works about the same way.

The place where things start to get problematic is ads based on user identity, placed by tracking users from site to site. The more that users learn how their data is used, the less tracking they tend to want. In one survey, 66% of adult Americans said they do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests, and when the researchers explained how ad targeting works, the percentage went up.

If users, on average, dislike tracking enough that sites choose to conceal it, then that’s pretty good evidence that sites should probably ask for permission to do it. Whether this opt-in should be enforced by law, technology, or both is left as an exercise for the reader.

So what happens if, thanks to new regulations, technical improvements in browsers, or both, cross-site tracking becomes harder? Rothenberg insists that this transformation would end ad-supported sites, but the real effects would be more complex. Ad-supported sites are already getting a remarkably lousy share of ad budgets. “The supply chain’s complexity and opacity net digital advertisers as little as 30 cents to 40 cents of working media for every dollar spent,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice said.

Advertising on high-reputation sites tends to be a better investment than using highly intermediated, fraud-prone, stacks of user tracking to try to chase good users to cheap sites. But crap ad inventory, including fraudulent and brand-unsafe stuff, persists. The crap only has market value because of user tracking, and it drives down the value of legit ads. If browser improvements or regulation make knowledge of user identity rarer, the crap tends to leave the market and the value of user intent and context go up.

Rothenberg speaks for today’s adtech, which despite all its acronyms and Big Data jive, is based on a pretty boring business model: find a user on a legit site, covertly follow the user to a crappy site where the ads are cheaper, sell an ad impression there, profit. Of course he’s entitled to make the case for enabling IAB members to continue to collect their “adtech tax.” But moving ad budgets from one set of players to another doesn’t end ad-supported sites, because marketers adjust. That’s what they do. There’s always something new in marketing, and budgets move around. What happens when privacy regulations shift the incentives, and make more of advertising have to depend on trustworthy content? That’s the real question here.

Perspectives

Getting the whole story on ad blocking

Covering the “adblock wars” (as Doc Searls calls the situation) is hard. It’s like going to a peaceful protest where organized looters show up and mix with the protesters.

  • If you’re reporting on the event and you quote some protesters without mentioning looting that you know about, then you missed half the story by ignoring what the store owners could have told you.
  • If you cover the looting but not whatever the peaceful protesters are saying, then you missed the opportunity to find out anything about the issue behind the protest.

It’s hard to read about ad blocking without seeing just one side of a complicated story. On one side, web ads have a malware problem, and a fraud problem, and the long-running paradox of why the most targetable ad media are the least valuable and the most blocked. Web ads clearly need some serious help. For users, running a wide-open browser that leaks personal data and accepts risky scripts is not a realistic option. Some kind of protection tool under the user’s control is good for users, and for brands and publishers that depend on reputation-driven advertising.

But we can’t lump looters in with reformers, or we start fooling ourselves on real problems in the ad blocking scene, the same way that ad tech proponents keep fooling themselves on malvertising and fraud. Even in the browser’s built-in help, users aren’t getting the facts they need.

ADblockscreen

Are users getting the truth about Adblock Plus?
One web browser’s built-in info, the source of the box shown above, makes Adblock Plus look pretty harmless. It’s labeled as the work of an individual—but it’s a corporate project. If you look at the actual code, it’s labeled “Copyright (C) 2006-2016 Eyeo GmbH”. That’s not the tricky part, though.

This description says that Adblock Plus “can” mitigate tracking and malware. But if you actually flip that cute little switch thingy, you automatically get the “Acceptable Ads” paid whitelisting program, which enforces no standards on tracking or security at all. In order to get the protection claimed, you have to both add an “EasyPrivacy” filter list subscription, and turn off “Acceptable Ads” with a confusingly named “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” checkbox. If “Acceptable Ads” is left on, it overrides the EasyPrivacy subscription, which is not clear from the UI. If Facebook or some other user-tracking site had this level of transparency, users would be starting petitions.

This paid whitelisting isn’t just “controversial”. It’s actively wrong by any standard but the Silicon Valley “anything for network effects lol” standard. It is one of the four problematic practices covered in a recent complaint from the Newspaper Association of America (PDF) to the US Federal Trade Commission.

[A]s a review of the practices of ad-blocking companies discloses, consumers do not “opt out” of an ecosystem by using ad-blockers. Instead, they “opt in” to a deceptive new environment that does not adequately disclose its practices to consumers.

Adblock Plus has raised quite a brouhaha among surprised users, with the company’s recent announcement that it was going into the targeted advertising business. It looks like the plan was a surprise to unaware “partners” Google and AppNexus, too. But whether or not Adblock Plus is really an ad network now, the company still participates in the web advertising market as an intermediary, creating trouble for legit web sites. And ultimately the “adblock wars” will be won or lost based on choices made at those sites. The people who work hard to put news and cultural works on the web will have to decide what to do about ad blocking. Web publishers are in a double crisis right now.

Intermediaries can afford to hand-wave on the fraud problem, tell brand advertisers to go hire a security expert somewhere, and concentrate on blocking. Publishers, who bear the real costs of adfraud, can’t.

The good news is that promising solutions are already out there. The “reinvention not reinsertion” concept, from Dr. Johnny Ryan at PageFair, is a good example. Better privacy protection for a smaller number of higher-quality ads helps make them resistant to both blocking and fraud.

Privacy tool developers and publishers share interests, but in order to understand what we have in common, we must communicate clearly about the difference between, on one side, legit user concerns and the tools that address them, and on the other, the publisher-hostile paid whitelisting racket. If we want to make a reasonable case for next-generation advertising, it has to work for the people who write, shoot, edit, and publish our news and cultural works. That starts with telling the whole story.

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is a participation strategist for Mozilla, where he works on open source collaboration issues. He does not speak for Mozilla on this site, and any opinions expressed here are personal ones. Don can be reached by email at [email protected].

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Service journalism and the web advertising problem

There’s a toenail fungus photo in my morning news.

And it looks like it’s an ad for some questionable toenail-fungus-treating multi-level-marketing scheme.

Yeech. How did that get on there? Pass the ad blocker already.

Forget tracking protection, forget new standards for responsible advertising, forget all that. Gross infected body parts and MLM ads before I have even had my coffee? Burn all this stuff down.

Terrible ads are a big reason why tracking protection seems like an incomplete solution to the problems of web advertising. Web users don’t just block ads because people are good applied behavioral economists, seeking signal and filtering noise. A lot of web ads are just deceptive, annoying, gross, or all three. (Oh, right, some of them carry malware, too.)

Even if we could somehow combine the efficiency and depth of the web medium with the signaling power of print or TV, won’t web ads still be crap? And won’t people still block them?

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Publisher standards
Print ads are less crappy than web ads. Why can’t publishers enforce better standards on the web? How can a newspaper have memorable, well-designed ads in print, while the ads on the web site have users looking for the computer sanitizer?

It’s hard for publishers to enforce standards when an original content site is in direct competition with bottom-feeder and fraud sites that claim to reach the same audience. And that competition is enabled by third-party tracking. As Aram Zucker-Scharff mentions in an interview on the Poynter Institute site, the number of third-party trackers on a site grows as new advertising deals bring new trackers along with them. All those third-party pixels and scripts—and a news site might have 50 to 70 of them—cause slowness and obvious user experience problems. But the deeper problem, data leakage, is harder to pick out. Any of those third parties could be leaking audience data into the dark corners of the Lumascape until it re-emerges, attached to a low-value or fraudulent site that can claim to reach the same audience as the original publisher.

Publishers can try to pin down their third parties with contractual restrictions, but it’s prohibitively expensive for a publisher to figure out what any one tracker is up to. You know that sign at the corner store, “only two high school students in the store at a time”? If the storekeeper lets 50-70 kids in, he can’t see who shoplifted the Snickers bar. The news site is in the same situation on third parties. Because any one publisher has contact with so many intermediaries, only the perpetrators can see where data is leaking.

A security point of view
Information security is hard. When you have to maintain software, you fix a bug when you can see that there’s a bug. You don’t wait until someone starts exploiting it. The earlier you fix it, the less it costs.

News sites work this way for some issues. If you found a bug in your site’s content management system that would allow a remote user to log in as “editor” and change stories, you would fix it. Even if you had no evidence that random people were logging in, it’s not worth taking the chance. Because it’s so hard to catch data leakage in the act, it makes sense to apply the same bug-fixing principle. When there is an emergent bug in the combination of your site and the user’s browser that allows for data leakage, then it is more effective to proactively limit it than to try to follow audience data through multiple third parties.

That doesn’t mean just walking away from all third-party tracking. Henk Kox, Bas Straathof, and Gijsbert Zwart write, in Targeted advertising, platform competition and privacy

We find that more targeting increases competition and reduces the websites’ profits, but yet in equilibrium websites choose maximum targeting as they cannot credibly commit to low targeting. [emphasis added] A privacy protection policy can be beneficial for both consumers and websites.

. . .

If websites could coordinate on targeting, proposition 1 suggests that they might want to agree to keep targeting to a minimum. However, we next show that individually, websites win by increasing the accuracy of targeting over that of their competitors, so that in the non- cooperative equilibrium, maximal targeting results.

When publishers lack market power, they have to play a game that’s rigged against them.

Changing the game
So how to turn web advertising from a race to the bottom into a sustainable revenue source, like print or TV ads? How can the web work better for high-reputation brands that depend on costly signaling?

C.H.E.D.D.A.R is a basic set of technical choices that make web ads work in a signal-carrying way, and restore market power to news sites.

Some of the work has to happen on the user side, but tracking protection for users can start paying off for sites immediately. Every time a user gets protected from third-party tracking, a little bit of competing, problematic ad inventory goes away. For example, if a chain restaurant wants to advertise to people in your town, today they have a choice: support local content, or pay intermediaries who follow local users to low-value sites. When the users get protected from tracking, opportunities to reach them by tracking tend to go away, and market power returns to the local news site.

And users see a benefit when a site has market power, because the site can afford to enforce ad standards. (and pay copy editors, but that’s another story.)

Service journalism
Users are already concerned and confused about web ads. That’s an opportunity. The more that someone learns about how web advertising works, the more that he or she is motivated to get protected. A high-reputation publisher can win by getting users safely protected from tracking, and not caught up in publisher-hostile schemes such as paid whitelisting, ad injection, and fake ad blockers.

Here is a great start, on the New York Times site. Read the whole thing:

Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You
by BRIAN X. CHEN and NATASHA SINGER

The next step is to make it more interactive. Use web analytics to pick out a reader who is

  • valuable as an audience member
  • vulnerable to third-party tracking
  • using a browser for which you know a good protection tool

and give that reader a nice “click here to get protected” button that goes to your tool of choice. There is JavaScript to do this.

Tracking protection for users means fewer ad impressions available at bottom-feeder and fraud sites, which means more market power for news sites, which means sites gain the ability to enforce standards. Put it all together, and no more toenail fungus ads before breakfast.

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He serves as a strategic adviser for Mozilla, and is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

Perspectives

Is your data leaking?

We hear a lot about ad blocking and ad fraud, but surprisingly little about data leakage, the underlying problem that feeds both. What is data leakage, anyway?

Sophia Cope at NAA: Data leakage is the collection and monetization of an online publisher’s audience data by a third party without the publisher’s knowledge and consent.

John McDermott at Digiday: Data leakage typically occurs when a brand, agency or ad tech company collects data about a website’s audience and subsequently uses that data without the initial publisher’s permission.

Note that these definitions include nothing about user permission. That’s a separate issue. Data leakage is a publisher/third-party problem, not a publisher/user problem. Both definitions are based on publisher permission.

That’s a good start. But “permission” is hard. The reality is that publishers often don’t understand all of the third-party resources on their own sites. And to make things worse, third parties bring along other third parties … with the result being that pages can end up with 50-70 third-party pixels, scripts, and iframes. (There’s even a zone on the Lumascape devoted to services that a publisher can use to figure out what other services they’re using.)

Every one of those third parties comes with some kind of contractual “permission.” All of those permissions, though, are expressed in complex contracts. Even if a publisher can afford to comprehend the terms of one contract, the set of resources on a page can introduce unwanted data transfers working in combination. And the combinations of technology and contracts change faster than anyone can evaluate them.

Learning from security software
It’s inadvisable for security companies to call malware “malware” when the malware developer has a lawyer. The solution has been to come up with a new category name, Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs). The definition is based on whether the software works against the user’s interests, not on whether the user has clicked on “I agree” after not reading a complex, deceptive contract.

Labeling programs as PUPs is a small win. It is possible to define a problem in terms of interests and norms, not in terms of what someone has “agreed” to. We will be able to have a more productive discussion of the data leakage problem if we can shift the definition from one based on “permission” to one based on publisher interests and business norms. Remember: Data leakage is not a problem about user permission (which is another story). Instead, user norms and expectations can be a helpful way to establish the definition of data leakage.

So here’s a new definition:
Data leakage is collection or transfer of publisher audience data in a manner that violates the norms and expectations of the members of the audience.

Why is it important to clearly define data leakage? Because we still have trouble collecting data on it, and to do so, we need to know what to measure. We don’t know how much of the ongoing problem that newspapers have with building online ad revenue is attributable to data leakage.

In order to measure data leakage, we have to define it based on a reasonable standard, not on a mess of contracts that results in publishers unknowingly “agreeing” to practices that work against their interests.

Finding data leakage
We can look for leaks at the top of the pipe and at the bottom:

Bad bots visiting good sites: Fraudulent ad inventory gains value from associated user data, which is why even the best-run sites still get some fraudbot traffic. Bots are collecting cookies on legit sites, then showing up as valuable “users” on fraud sites. If your site has a small bot problem, then any advertiser paying to reach your users on other sites will have a big bot problem.

Good audiences available in bad places: We don’t have access to the “user data chop shops” that sit between legit publishers and sales of targeted impressions based on publisher data. But we can look at demand-side platforms to find out where valuable impressions are showing up, and measure the impact of anti-data-leakage tests.

Data leakage is an important issue that must be better understood and addressed.We can’t deal with ad blocking, ad fraud, and low ad revenue without understanding the data leakage problem. The good news is that data leakage is measurable, if we work it from the legit publisher end and the questionable inventory end.

 

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He serves as a strategic advisor for Mozilla, and is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

Advertising | Perspectives

Where’s the signal? (And why it matters to digital advertisers)

Philosopher Thomas Wells, in an essay for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, argues that advertising is a market failure:

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good – access to your attention – doesn’t reflect its full social cost.

…

Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.

For the web, though, there is still time to turn advertising into a net positive, if we fix a few things.

The main reason advertising exists is to help deal with information asymmetry. Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof pointed out that, in a market where low-quality and high-quality sellers compete, and sellers know their products better than buyers do, high-quality sellers have trouble staying in business. When the buyer can’t tell a low-quality car, a lemon, from a high-quality car, no buyer can justify paying more than a lemon’s value for any car.

Over thousands of years, people have figured out ways to deal with Akerlof’s market for lemons problem. Licensing of sellers, product reviews, and protecting trademarks are all ways to give some advantage to quality sellers.

Advertising is another piece of the solution. Tom Goodwin compares advertising to stone buildings for banks, and writes:

Old world advertising used to be the same, the very act of investing in TV, buying a premium billboard, taking an ad in Vogue, became brand building because of the cost, not despite. The general public doesn’t know rate cards, but there was a tacit, enduring, innate feeling that companies that advertised were companies of quality.

Perceived advertising costs matter to users. In The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works, Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier describe a signaling test based on showing “expensive” and “degraded” versions of the same TV commercials to experimental subjects, and found:

[P]erceived expense influences perceptions of brand quality, which in turn is the most critical predictor of a participant’s inclination to purchase a brand.

Wells, however, argues that signaling is a waste. He writes:

Like banks housed in grand marbled buildings, companies which pour vast amounts of money into advertising campaigns must be supremely confident about the quality of their products and its long-term sales. Otherwise they couldn’t afford to burn so much money on ridiculous Super Bowl ads. This argument rather reminds me of John Maynard Keynes’s suggestion that in a recession caused by a collapse of aggregate demand one could solve the problem by burying bottles filled with bank notes and then leaving it to private enterprise to dig them up again.

But signaling isn’t just based on the production values of the ad.

Ads appear with content. Signal is proportional to the value of the content, not just the ad itself. In signal-carrying media such as magazines, a positive feedback loop can emerge. Valuable signal-carrying ads bring in money for content, whose quality and perceived cost increases signaling power, therefore ad rates, and so on. This can make a signal-carrying medium a great business to be in.

But when advertisers try to target users individually, signaling breaks down. Targeting turns an ad into the digital version of a cold call. Targeted ads tend to “burn out” the medium in which they appear, through a Peak Advertising effect. Each new targetable medium falls in value and popularity as users figure it out, filter it, or get their governments to restrict it.

Even when a web ad appears on expensive content, it fails to carry the signal that it would convey in a less targetable medium. Users are aware that ads “follow them around,” so instead of viewing an ad as part of an expensive, signal-carrying ad buy, even an ad on high-quality content could be an example of cheap targeting.

Solutions
The two extreme positions on web ads each miss something. Ad blocking everywhere and eliminating ad-supported content is clearly suboptimal. The existence of magazines that people voluntarily subscribe to is proof that some level of advertising can work.

The other extreme is anti-adblocking, telling users to stay in an unprotected, targetable state. This doesn’t work, not just because of the malvertising problem, which make some protection a necessity, but because of signaling failure.

A third way is needed. Fortunately, tracking protection tools are able to block cold-call-like targeted ads while permitting signal-carrying ads. Instead of waiting for more and more users to give up on advertising and get an ad blocker, publishers can help and encourage users to run tracking protection tools instead. But if sites fail to turn the web into a signal-carrying medium, web ads could slide into a no-win struggle like email spam/anti-spam, and anti-advertising philosophy could turn out to be right after all.

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article, which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

 

Advertising | Perspectives

Ad blocking: Why now?

Users say that they’re blocking ads because of the annoyance. But ad blocking has only recently started to catch on, and ad annoyance has been there since the beginning. Distracting blinky ads, slow page load times, security concerns, the whole enchilada. For many users, web ads in the days of dial-up connections and pop-up windows were even more annoying than the web ads of today.

The ease of use of ad blocking hasn’t changed either. Free, convenient ad blockers have been available for more than a decade. But WebWasher, AdSubtract and others earned good reviews, then failed to catch on.

Today, though, ad blocking is a thing. And that’s not so much because new reasons to block ads are appearing, but because reasons not to block are going away.

AdBlock1

  • The red line, retargeting, is a query for a form of targeted advertising that is easily visible to users—ads that users can see following them around. [View full report in Google Trends]
  • The blue line is a query for “how to block ads.” Users looking for a solution.

Why does the blue line start to take off only after the red line? Web ads were just as annoying before users started to see how they were targeted. What is it about targeted ads that changed the decision to block? Why was the 2010 What They Know series in the Wall Street Journal such a big deal?

Is better targeting causing blocking, or is it just an accidental correlation? Survey data suggests that users react differently to ads depending on how accurately they are targeted. In one study, 66% of adult Americans said they do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. And when the researchers explained how adtech can target ads to them, the percentage saying they don’t want targeting went up—as high as 80%.

If you don’t believe academic studies, believe the company with the best marketing in the world. Would Apple really put this copy on the Safari browser page…

The web pages you visit often leave cookies from third-party websites. These cookies can be used to track where you go on the web, target you with ads, or create a profile of your online activities. Safari was the first browser to block these cookies by default.

…if it didn’t resonate with users? If users like being tracked, Safari could easily feature extra tracking, to help users connect and share with brands.

Are ad blocker users irrationally squicked-out by targeting that’s actually good for them? And are users just being dishonest by using web content without accepting the ads?

Fair is fair: advertising and the reciprocity norm
It turns out that ad blocker users are pretty good at applied behavioral economics. If we understand what the basic bargain behind advertising is, we can understand why people put up with advertising in some media but block it in others.

Gavin Dunaway at AdMonsters writes:

The transaction between most Internet content providers and users is something I’ve always referred to as the “unspoken handshake” – users pay for their content consumption with personal data as well as by allowing advertisers the opportunity to reach them.

That’s one kind of fair exchange. It’s the lead generation bargain. Fill out this form to WATCH OUR FREE WEBINAR! People choose to reveal personal info all the time, every time they enter a sweepstakes or swipe a supermarket loyalty card.

But are users passively choosing to share data with unknown third parties? (Quick, name three companies that ran trackers on the last news story you read, and what they do with your data.) Studies suggest otherwise.

AdBlock2But advertising isn’t just about the lead generation bargain. Lead generation can send a special offer to buy a product for a lower price…

…but it can’t build a brand that people will be happy to pay a higher price for. That’s where signaling comes in.

Clearly lead generation is not the point of high-value old-school ad media such as TV, radio, and print. Nobody gives up any personal data to watch Knight Rider on broadcast TV, or buy a copy of the newspaper out of a vending machine. But that impersonal advertising is where the money is. Print is trending down but still more valuable than either web or mobile on a per user minute basis.

The bargain that matters in advertising’s big leagues is the exchange of signal for a user’s attention. An ad can be a public, credible, costly display of the advertiser’s intentions in the market. When an ad fails to send a signal, as is the case when it’s targeted to a user who can’t tell if it’s part of a big campaign or just the digital version of a cold call, the ad doesn’t hold up its end of the signal-for-attention bargain, and the user starts looking for an opportunity to block it.

One way to look at the blocking problem is to accuse ad blocker users of violating a reciprocity norm, by entering into an implied lead generation bargain and then failing to hold up their end. But the other, more valuable deal—the signal-for-attention bargain—is the one that advertisers broke first.

How to stick to both bargains?
One important direction is to make the lead generation bargain explicit, not sneaky. Instead of using malware-like third-party tracking techniques, make it easier for users to control how they share their info.

The other half is of the solution is to restore the signal-for-attention bargain. Some of the most promising new work from web browser developers holds the promise of changing the web advertising game to work more like signal-carrying print and broadcast media. Firefox and Apple Safari have tracking protection functionality in progress, and Microsoft Internet Explorer has had it for a while.

Tracking protection can displace ad blockers by filling users’ immediate need to block the low-value targeted ads that follow them, while at the same time leaving the door open for signal-carrying advertising that works better for brands and pays better for publishers.

Web publishers today have a choice: get dragged into a no-win game of blocking vs. anti-blocking, or change the conversation and offer users an alternative that works better for everyone. Instead of just lecturing users to turn off your ad blocker, it’s time to encourage them to enable tracking protection, and turn on the signal.

Don Marti is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He is the former editor ofLinux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article, which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

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