Digital publishers face three market challenges today that are triggering the re-examination of business strategies: 1) an increase in consumption of distributed content, 2) a surge in mobile traffic, and 3) growth in adoption of of ad blocking software. In order to better understand these market shifts and their impact on news consumption the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism commissioned a multi-country study, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, in February 2016.
Digital news publishers, in particular, are rethinking business models as social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are now viewed as major news resources for consumers, especially among millennials. In fact, half (51%) reported they use social media as a source of news each week. Around one in ten (12%) stated it is their main source. Further, the percentage of U.S. consumers subscribing to online news outlets has declined from 11% in 2015 vs. 9% in 2016. Many companies are thinking about taking down their paywalls in an effort to attract more users.
While personalization is often a positive experience, consumers are concerned with the personalization of their news content. Personalized content and social media applications often select news stories built on algorithms which are based on a consumer’s reading history, what his/her friends are reading and the sharing, the popularity and recency of an article. Respondents raised concerns with the algorithms selecting their news stories. In fact, six in 10 worry that personalized news applications change the nature of story selection and that they miss challenging viewpoints (60% and 59%, respectively). And half (49%) are concerned their privacy may be compromised.
In addition, the shift to mobile directly attributed to the increased use of smartphones to access news and the decreased use of desktops. Demographically, younger consumers prefer mobile for news access while older consumers look to desktop and tablet. Across multiple countries, over half (53%) reported that they use a smartphone to access news. Interestingly, consumers who report mainly using their smartphones to access news stories, do so by entering social media sites versus a branded website or app. Apps have become an impactful tool to send alerts and notifications to attract consumers and to bring them more regularly to the branded website.
The consumer adoption of ad blocking software is a most challenging problem for digital publishers, especially for those heavily dependent on advertising revenue. Of those that currently use an ad-blocker, the majority do so on a desktop with only about 8% do so on mobile. In addition, about one-third of consumers in Germany, UK, and the U.S. plan to install an ad-blocker on their smartphones in the next 12 months.
In the U.S. the key reasons for consumers using ad blocking software included:
I was fed up with the volume and distracting nature of advertisements in general, 68%
I dislike ads that follow me around from one site to another (privacy concerns, 55%
To improve the speed at which pages load, 50%
To save battery life, 13%
So I don’t use as much data on my mobile phone plan, 10%
As digital news publishers adapt to the changing marketplace, it’s important to note that consumers still want and value traditional news brands. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report speaks to digital news brands needing to clearly brand their high-quality content and provide a positive audience experience. Further, news brands need to find a balance between destination and distribution and continue to build their brand equity in order to evolve and continue to monetize their content.
Our business is a mess … and seemingly getting worse by the minute. This is a sad statement but, unfortunately, more true today than it was a year ago or a year before that.
While many have stated their commitment to increased transparency, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. While others have talked about efficiency, we are getting less efficient as an ecosystem by the day. Just about everyone talks about respecting consumer privacy as well as their experience, yet we continue to dig deeper and deeper into consumer’s habits without their permission and offer up a growing cacophony of misguided messaging despite these invasions.
From transparency to understanding
It really does not matter how we got to where we are; the unfortunate fact is that we are here. What matters is the how … and how fast, we can right the ship. I think the key is going to be less about transparency and more about understanding. For me this is a refinement of thinking because I’ve been advocating increased transparency for some time now. And, while transparency is a good thing on the whole, the more important issue in this situation is getting all the key players a better understanding of how the system is currently set up.
The saying goes that complexity breeds margin and to some extent that has proven true here; at least at the gross margin level. The bottom line is another issue, given the crazy estimates that AdTech companies are taking between 40 and 60% of every media dollar (depending on which study you look at).
What’s more efficient? Crazier still is what is being done in the name of efficiency. Consider third party data targeting, for example: Not only does this practice fail to work but it can lead to massive amounts of fraudulent impressions when done using open ad exchanges, which is really the only way to do it and get any scale.
Marketers looking for magic bullets are continually offered up bait and switch opportunities made palatable only because of the truly great performance of a small fraction of their buys. While other such efforts may achieve tolerable performance, this is hardly worth the byproduct of consumer adoption of ad blockers (in part to avoid the kind of tracking that makes these campaigns possible).
So sure, transparency will help in the sense that consumers will gain an increased understanding of when and where their data is being collected and how it is being used. But at the end of the day, without full understanding of the process by all the participants, it will be very hard to move our industry—and the state of digital advertising—to a better place. The self-interest of the middle is simply too overwhelming.
Learning our lesson
Of late, publishers—the supply side of the equation—have begun to get a better sense of what is happening but real change cannot happen without the marketers, the real demand-side also becoming much more learned about this new medium. (Let’s keep in mind that agencies and their trading desks are supposed to be agents acting on behalf of their clients.) Marketers need to be fully up to speed on what is happening, how it is being done and how it is doing on a granular basis.
The ANA’s recent efforts around this goal are to be lauded. They have worked hard to bring some very unsettling information to light in a highly charged environment. This kind of work is always hard and it takes great courage on many levels. ANA President and CEO Bob Liodice and his team are to be congratulated for what they have done so far and encouraged to keep at it.
As is always the case in free market environments, the folks with the initial dollars are the most important part of the financial ecosystem. I say “financial” because in general, the end-user really holds the most power. But unfortunately, educating end-users will take a lot longer than educating the marketers. Having said this though, one could argue that consumers have already begun to speak loudly with their aforementioned uptake of ad-blockers.
We have a truly amazing platform to work with. Digital media has so much going for it: It is incredibly flexible, it is interactive, it is not limited by form factor, it is multi-media and it should be extremely trackable. Unfortunately, as an industry we have done a lot to limit these assets. The fact that it still works as well as it does is amazing. Just imagine what it will do once we take the shackles off.
So let’s all do what we can to educate, well, everyone about the current state of the ecosystem. It is through this knowledge that the industry will find the right way to live with and deeply respect consumers while using technology and tracking in ways that allow marketers to use their dollars in more and more efficient ways. But beyond efficiency, increased understanding will lead to value being put where it should: With the outlets that generate the most consumer involvement and provide the best environments for messaging rather than a wide and growing group of “platforms” and other third parties that hijack the engagement of the media properties and also the trust of the consumer in the name of efficiency.
In our world of eye-popping stats, John Herrman recently shared a new one from a Morgan Stanley analyst that shakes the wobbly legs of the digital media industry in this New York Times column: “In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook.” Industry sources quickly tried to discredit this number as way too high even though for years many, including DCN, have noted overall market consolidation with this IAB/PWC report tracking the top ten’s growth from 70% to now 75% of the market.
But 85% to only these two companies?
Well, last week, IAB/PWC also released its quarterly U.S. advertising report, which was quickly followed by a “groundhog day” press release from the IAB, the industry trade group for the advertising sector, announcing the rapid rise of digital ad revenue. The Report notes that first quarter U.S. internet ad revenues hit a record-setting high after the highest growth in four years hitting a “21% rise over the same time period in 2015.” We don’t dispute this number. We just think it’s important to highlight that only two IAB members are benefitting from this increasingly lopsided ecosystem.
Using Facebook and Google’s public earnings, it’s very simple to back into the math. The table below illustrates the estimated U.S. ad revenue growth for Google, Facebook and what I affectionately like to call “Everyone Else.” These calculations show nearly 90% of the growth going to the two companies. If you’re in the “Everyone Else” group, you’re competing for $300 million of the $2.7 billion in Q1 growth.
Stop and let that sink in for a minute.
It seems the only other ways money is being made in the digital advertising ecosystem is through:
Intermediaries who capture 55% of the supply chain according to IAB research on the “Ad Tech Tax” that marketers are funding;
Fraud, which according to the ANA, results in more than $7 Billion per year being dislocated; and
Other shenanigans, which the ANA reported on last week in its groundbreaking Transparency Report.
And whether we like it or not, no discussion of ad revenue is complete without factoring in ad blocking. I want to once again applaud the IAB for bringing together its members last week to discuss user experience issues in light of ad blocking. I was pleased to be able to listen through the entire day and appreciated that most of the agenda was filled with DCN’s premium publisher members. Because DCN’s members depend on trusted and direct relationships with consumers and advertisers, our members are often closest to the value exchange with the consumer and to the impact from the installation of ad blockers across the web.
Senior strategy executive Mark Frost of Strategic Ink, opened the event by sharing the key findings from a recent IAB, 4As and ANA workshop. Most important was the self-awareness about the failures of ad tech, retargeting and unbridled data collection that often doesn’t serve the consumer. As we’ve written many times, the fact that digital advertising consistently ranks as the least trusted form of advertising speaks volumes. And, it is interesting in light of the revelation that Google and Facebook have a near-monopoly on digital advertising, that a recent report from Wells Fargo Securities and Optimal showed that consumers trust Google and Facebook least of all with their data.
This brings me to my final point. Princeton released research last month showing that Google and Facebook together account for all of the top ten third-party data collectors across the web. The impressively-credentialed researchers Arvind Narayanan and Steven Englehardt wrote, “In fact, Google, Facebook, and [their increasingly poor cousin, my words] Twitter are the only third-party entities present on more than 10% of sites.” It’s worth noting that Twitter is the only one of these three companies to publicly honor Do Not Track.
Google alone owns all of the top five third-party domains across the top one million websites. In the words of Harvard Business School Association Professor Ben Edelman, “No other firm engages in even a fraction of this tracking.” Importantly, his comment came in a filing of concern about the FCC opening up the set-top box business. While there are consumer merits to the FCC’s position, there is also significant concern we’ll be lowering the privacy bar so that Google and others can spoil another ecosystem with tracking and copyright issues. And this at a time when all bars need to be raised to protect consumers and the content they often enjoy for “free”— that is, at the cost of their time spent viewing advertising.
All of this information is vital to understanding the dynamics around data ownership and ad blocking — two complex issues which will impact our ability to evolve and improve the web we want as an industry. Facebook, due to its closed platform, and Google, due its dominance in browsers, ad tech, search and advertising, will have a large seat at nearly any industry or regulatory table discussing critical issues. So we urge the industry to keep your eyes wide open. Lax rules around data collection and use and incomplete solutions to ad blocking may very well play into their hands as they angle to swallow up that last 10%.
Notes and References
1Google 2016 1st Quarter Earnings Report – estimated based on reported total U.S. revenues x 90% (percentage of Google revenues represented by advertising).
Ad blocking on desktop has been a thorn in the side of publishers for years, but it’s the advance of ad blocking on mobile and built into browsers – and the stunning growth trajectory of ad blocking usage across markets including China and India – that poses the greatest threat to digital media companies that depend on advertising for revenue.
This is the key takeaway of Adblocking Goes Mobile, a recent report published by Page Fair, a company working to mitigate ad blocking with the help of technology it claims addresses the speed, privacy, and UX issues that cause ad blocking in the first place. Drawing from research and analysis of ad blocking browsers and capabilities conducted in collaboration with app intelligence firm Priori Data, the report sheds important light on the factors driving the meteoric growth ad blocking around the globe.
To date the report points out that “at least 419 million people are blocking ads on smartphones.” That’s nearly twice the number of consumers blocking ads on desktops and PCs. Do the math, and 22% of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users are blocking ads on the mobile Web.
While mobile ad blocking browsers have become a mainstream technology, there are important differences in how and where consumers block ads in their content and news.
In fact, mobile ad blocking usage and mobile data infrastructure appear to be inextricably linked, with consumers in Asia-Pacific adopting ad blocking browsers as a way to curb bandwidth-eating ads, improve page load speeds and ultimately keep a lid on mobile data costs. Overall, over one-third (33%) of smartphone users in the region are blocking ads with the help of an ad blocking browser. The report estimates that as of March 2016, the region contained a whopping 55% of global smartphone users, but “93% of ad blocking browser usage.”
The mass adoption of ad blocking browsers in markets including China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan means massive problems for digital media serving those markets. As the report puts it: “Mobile ad is a serious threat to the future of media and journalism in emerging markets, where people are coming online
for the first time via relatively expensive or slow mobile connections.”
Ad blocking usage in North America and Europe is not as widespread, thanks to developed mobile data infrastructure and affordable data plans. But there are also distinct differences. Ad blocking browsers are popular in Europe, while content blocking apps (apps that block ads in web pages viewed via a Safari browser on Apple’s iOS 9 Apple devices, for example) are 3x more popular in North America than in Europe.
In total (as of March 2016) the report reckons there were 14 million monthly active users of ad blocking browsers in Europe and North America. In total, 4.9 million content blocking and in-app ad blocking apps were downloaded from app stores in Europe and North America since September 2014.
The mature mobile markets of North America and Europe are marked by slow, but steady adoption of ad blocking browsers and content blocking apps. It’s the calm before the storm as the range of ad blocking tech continues on an impressive growth trajectory. The report identified an incredible 229 different content blocking apps on Apple iOS alone. Expect the numbers to skyrocket now that Samsung will make good on its promise that the default browser on its Android devices will support its version of content blocking. Growth of ad blocking tech will also see a huge boost as more browsers (not just operating systems) add ad blocking support and make it easier for consumers to configure their preferences.
It’s important to have a report that draws from empirical data, not user surveys, to understand the increasingly complex landscape of mobile ad blocking technology. Now it’s up to the media and publishing industry to use this report as a starting point to address the root causes and issues that are convincing consumer to use adblockers in the first place.
Fortunately, the report takes the first steps, inviting industry leaders and associations – including Digital Content Next – to weigh in with their opinions on the rise of ad blocking technology and why a focus on delivering a better user/reader advertising experience should be top of mind with all digital media companies and brands.
But the elephant in the room is not the quality of ads but the disconnect between how the industry approaches monetization and what they should really value. Perhaps David Chavern, CEO, Newspaper Association of America, sums it up best: “We [also] measure digital ads by a metric — “impressions” — that has no real meaning or value. If we don’t fix these problems, and we allow ad blockers to take over, then we will be left with small, subscription models that will exclude large portions of the public. Not being able to afford HBO is one thing. Not being able to afford quality news would be a much more serious problem.”
Each year, analyst Mary Meeker — a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — releases her massive Internet Trends report, with businesses scurrying to take advantage of her insights into what’s hot and what’s not. This year, Meeker released the report while at the Code Conference, for maximum high-level impact. There’s a lot to chew on, but here are the most important trends for content creators and online publishers.
Google, Facebook Dominate; Mobile Undersold While U.S. Internet advertising is growing, Google and Facebook remain the dominant platforms for selling advertising on the Internet. The two platforms collectively control a 76% share of the growth in U.S. online advertising, Meeker noted, using numbers from last year’s IAB/PwC Advertising Report. All others besides Google and Facebook saw growth of 13% in online ads in 2015.
On another front, advertising growth has yet to actually reach its full potential because marketers aren’t spending enough on mobile. As Wired’s Davey Alba wrote, “They’re still committing too many of their dollars to so-called legacy media.” As such, the $22 billion that is spent on mobile advertising in the U.S. is a tiny amount of what it should be, according to Meeker’s report. Indeed, only 12% of all advertising right now is mobile. While this presents a boon for content created or optimized for mobile, it’s also a huge risk and concern for traditional media players, as Larry Downes wrote in the Washington Post.
One big hurdle for mobile is the rise of ad-blocking. Four hundred and twenty million people around the world are now using some form of ad blocking software on their mobile phones, according to PageFair. When looking at the reasoning behind the rise of ad blocking, including privacy concerns, the onus is on publishers and marketers. They must not only appeal to consumer behaviors, but also to their aesthetics and feelings of what good advertising should be. Advertising on Snapchat, for example, is in part successful because it’s short, sweet and integrated into the platform seamlessly so that it’s part of the user’s natural experience. (And it’s outside the realm of ad-blocking.)
Messaging and Visual Communication Rising Among Millennials and Generation Z, visual communication is king. As Recode’s Noah Kulwin pointed out, “People worldwide shared almost twice as many photos in 2015 as they did in 2014, and almost half of that happened on a service owned by Facebook.”
And whether it’s a photo, video or live-stream — such as Candace Payne’s viral Facebook Live video trying on a Chewbacca mask — advertisers can very much take advantage of the sharability of visual communications. Take the Candance Payne example, as Larry Downes wrote in the Washington Post: She mentioned Kohl’s department store twice in her video — and that video was viewed more than 150 million times in one day. In turn, the company’s app leaped to the top of the charts in the iOS App Store. If user-generated video can redefine advertising in such a way, expect more videos with branded content.
And when it comes to messaging apps, that means commerce communication is officially entering the fold. “Messaging apps are continuously becoming the second home screen,” Meeker said during her presentation. If the best way to connect with Millennials — now representing 27% of the population, with a spending power that’s going to rise — is on messenging apps, then that’s the natural destination for advertisers. The rise of voice-recognition software on these apps also means that the commercial applications can’t be ignored. Perhaps dictating the purchase of a product via speech on a messaging app may not be far off.
Global Internet Growth is Slowing — Except for India Global Internet growth is slowing, except for India, where user growth is actually accelerating at 40%. India has now surpassed the U.S. to become the second most connected population after China. With more Indians purchasing mobile phones — which will be the entry point for the majority of Indians accessing the Internet — the potential for publishers and advertisers in this space is huge.
India then serves as an interesting case study through which marketers can better understand how to target new Internet users. As Meeker discussed during her presentation, new Internet users are becoming increasingly harder to find because they come from poorer, developing countries, where the cost of a smartphone is a significant portion of a person’s income. The cost of a smartphone in India is relatively low compared to other countries, however, so it would behoove advertisers to capitalize on this market potential.
New York Times President and CEO, Mark Thompson addressed the IAB Ad Blocking Summit, held June 6, 2016 in New York City. In his talk, An Update from The New York Times on Its Approach to Ad Blocking, Thompson took a hard look at the factors contributing to the rise of ad blocking and urged the entire industry to take responsibility for fostering a climate in which digital advertising degrades the user experience and fuels the adoption of ad blockers. Through the lens of The New York Times experience, Thompson provided insights into productive and proactive steps that digital content companies – and the entire industry – can take to address ad blocking.
Below is the full text of the talk he delivered:
Mark Thompson, President & Chief Executive Officer, The New York Times Company
Thanks Randall [Randall Rothenberg. President and CEO of the IAB].
I want to make five points this morning. The first is that we have to clean up our own act as an industry.
To a significant extent, the root cause of digital ad-blocking is digital ads and the way many websites deploy them on their sites.
Too many ads. Intrusive and distracting ads. Ads which slow page-load to a crawl, or are slow to load in and of themselves. Boring and uncreative ads, which no user can possibly enjoy viewing. ‘Relevance’ –if it means endlessly retargeting users with ads for something they searched for and bought or lost interest in weeks ago. The pervasive and indiscriminate tracking and sharing of user data.
We’re not all equally guilty. At The New York Times, we’ve kept the number of display ads on the page low. We’ve worked hard with our advertising partners to develop campaigns that are creative and compelling. We’ve developed new units and ideas – like Flex Frames which we launched last year as Mobile Moments on smartphone and which we’ll extend to all platforms this September.
But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. If a user installs an ad-blocker because of unacceptable ad experiences somewhere else then, guilty or not, we still face the challenge of persuading them to uninstall it or, more plausibly, to whitelist us so that their ad blocker allows our ads to load. Our first task as an industry is get rid of the bad experiences which make that whole tricky process necessary.
And our second is to develop and promote digital advertising whose originality and quality engages and delights users and, because of that, also delivers real results for advertisers.
In a world of phones and feeds, marketers need to think like programmers rather than as traditional advertisers, not trying to steal attention which is directed at something else, but offering consumers content which actually has value to them, in the right context and user-experience.
Our branded content business at The Times is all about that – creating and distributing high quality programming for marketers. It didn’t exist in 2013. It delivered more than $13m of revenue in 2014, and $34 million in 2015. We expect it to grow very substantially again in 2016.
For us, branded content does not mean fake journalism trying to pass itself off as genuine newsroom output. It’s work like the animated virtual reality film we made for GE for the launch of our VR app and the distribution of a million Google cardboards. High quality content well worth consuming in its own right.
And it’s not just about branded content; we’re also focusing quite a bit of energy on making display advertising better. Fewer, faster ads, delivered at the pace of mobile and more compelling at the point of discovery, where the user first sees the ad. Clearly labeled but an integral part of the main news feed, on both the phone and the desktop. Bigger, punchier units that provide a better canvas for creativity.
Third, we must do a much better job of explaining our business model – and the connection between advertising revenue and high quality content – to our users.
Let me talk about The New York Times first, then turn to digital publishing as a whole.
At The Times we have two big revenue streams in both print and digital: subscription and advertising. In print, where we make around $1 billion of revenue a year, the proportion is currently about 60/40, with $600 million coming from home delivery subscription and newsstand sales, and $400 million from print advertising. In digital, at present it’s more or less 50/50.
Our digital news subscription business is the largest and most successful in the world and it’s still growing rapidly. In the first quarter of 2016, we added 67,000 net new subscriptions – that’s more than we did in any of the three previous years. Our model is accelerating, in other words.
But delivering national and international journalism to the quality to which The Times aspires and our users expect means massive investment. We believe we can grow our digital subscription business until we have many times the current number of subscription relationships, which across print, digital, news and crosswords stands at around two and a half million. We do not believe that we will ever be able to sustain Times journalism or The New York Times as a flourishing business without an advertising business of real scale.
We need to spell this out clearly to our users. The journalism they enjoy costs real money and needs to be paid for. Advertising is a vital part of the revenue mix.
Everyone knows and accepts that physical newspapers cost money to produce and that someone who steals a copy of a newspaper from a newsstand is a thief. That’s not a word I’d use of those who install ad blockers – the Internet has left many people with the erroneous impression that digital high quality content doesn’t cost anything to produce – but there are some awkward facts to be faced.
If you consume great journalism without making any contribution towards paying for the journalists and the editors and photographers and videographers and graphics artists and engineers, and if enough people follow your example, that journalism will either be diluted or restricted to the relatively small number of people who have the willingness and ability to buy a subscription. And not just you but everyone will be impoverished as a result.
We want our journalism to be widely available and for non-subscribers as well as subscribers to be able to sample large amounts of it. Of the around 110 million people who come to us each month, more than 107 million are not subscribers. If ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, that kind of free reach will no longer make economic sense.
We believe in the civic value of our journalism and we want it to be widely read across America and the world, but not if that undermines our ability to continue to produce it.
No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it. We are not there yet but, if we judge that it will strengthen the long-term prospects of that journalism to prevent non-subscribers who employ ad blockers and refuse to whitelist us from reading it, we’ll do it.
But if this is a real issue for us, consider those publishers who do not have a digital subscription model and who are entirely reliant on digital advertising, to replace falling print revenues in the case of legacy companies, and for the whole of their revenue in the case of digital ones.
I don’t need to tell anyone here that digital advertising is going through a wider disruption with the astonishingly rapid switch of consumption to smartphone, the decline of standard web rotational display, the power of the major social and search platforms and so on. My friend Shane Smith talked recently about a likely bloodbath among advertising-dependent publishers this year. I’m British and I find the word ‘bloodbath’ a shade melodramatic – especially from a Canadian – but I agree with Shane’s analysis.
This is why proportionate but meaningful industry-wide action on ad blocking is so important.
So put my first three points together and think of them as a potential new agreement between publishers and users. We have a responsibility to work with advertisers to deliver rich, enjoyable, valuable ad experiences, and to use and pass on data about their visits to our sites fairly and transparently. They have a responsibility to contribute to the economic sustainability of quality content creation.
In the end, free riding will not just damage us and the wider public realm. It will damage them.
Let’s now turn to my fourth point, which is a practical one. There is early but encouraging evidence that a significant proportion of users will respond to clear messaging about ad blocking and the threat it poses to quality content.
And that point is grounded in a basic idea that has become a requirement of digital business: when you empower your customers by providing them with choice, good things can happen.
Over the past few months, as part of a wider program of experiments and surveys, we’ve tested both dismissible and undismissible messages about ad blocking. Both sets of messages sought to explain to users who had installed an ad blocker the connection between advertising revenue and the journalism they wanted to consume.
With the dismissible messages, the user could click and close the message and go on to read the story they had come to The Times for in the first place. undismissible messages prevented users who got them from reading the journalism at all, unless they agreed to whitelist us in their ad blocker.
We tested both dismissible and undismissible messages with non-subscribers. You won’t be surprised to hear that, at least in these limited tests, undismissible messages were much more effective than dismissible ones. Indeed, more than 40% of those who encountered the undismissible message agreed to whitelist The Times.
Times subscribers are already making a significant contribution to the funding of our journalism, so we think of them very differently. We did not put undismissible messages in front of these valued paying customers. But we did try dismissible messages – and no fewer than 30% of the ad blocker-using subscribers we tested agreed to whitelist The New York Times.
We’re still testing and analyzing, but even at this early stage we have confidence that – if we decide to move in this direction – we will be able to convince many of those who use ad blockers to whitelist us so that ads still load on The New York Times site. It may be that, in both cases, the percentages of those agreeing to whitelist would grow over time – though we also recognize that some ad blocking non-subscribers, who are repeatedly confronted with such messages but who are unwilling to whitelist, might give up using our site altogether.
That would be a pity, but neither they nor we can have it both ways. It’s not fair to continue to consume something you’re not prepared to support in any way. As for us, in principle we don’t want to stop anyone from sampling Times journalism, but we also have to accept that someone who won’t subscribe or look at ads doesn’t help us succeed in any way at all.
But we do want to offer all of our users as much choice as we can, and we recognize that there are some users – both subscribers and current non-subscribers – who would prefer to have an ad-free experience.
So we are also exploring the possibility of offering a higher tier digital subscription offer which would allow users to enjoy Times journalism without seeing advertisements, while still making a fair contribution towards its creation.
My fifth and final point is that – although we recognize some of the frustrations that have led users to adopt ad blockers – there are technologies and practices associating with ad blocking which are unfair and deceptive. We intend to push back against them and we want to encourage the rest of the industry to do the same.
We are particularly troubled by the business model of some of the largest ad blockers who whitelist advertising in return for payment, thus effectively requiring digital publishers to pay in order to receive advertisements to their own users – including advertisements which are, by anyone’s definition, non-invasive.
The largest entity engaged in this practice is the private limited company Eyeo, which owns both the leading desktop ad blocker, Adblock Plus, and the so-called Acceptable Ads whitelist, which seeks a 30% of revenue from any firm that generates more than 10 million unblocked ad impressions a month as a result of appearing on its whitelist.
This is a manifestly unsavory business practice. Ad blockers often portray themselves as an answer to unsatisfactory digital advertising experiences. But Eyeo wasn’t founded by concerned citizens. It was founded by a digital ad veteran and represents the most cynical, most money-grasping end of the old unreformed digital ad business. We need to expose Eyeo, Adblock Plus and the Acceptable Ads whitelist, so that the public can see them for what they are.
Unlike most of the other ad blockers in the marketplace, Eyeo is not attempting to limit tagging to protect privacy – they permit trackers to pay to be included in their Acceptable Ads programs.
Eyeo’s secondary line of business has been to license the “Acceptable Ads” whitelist to other ad blockers, including some smaller mobile ad blockers. The second largest ad blocker, Ad Block, which was sold in October to and unknown buyer, also uses Eyeo’s Acceptable Ads list.
We want to encourage other publishers and counterparts throughout the industry, and the organizations which represent us, to be trenchant in publicly confronting ad blockers who engage in these coercive and misleading business practices. Recently, we have joined with other publishers in the NAA in filing a complaint with the FTC to investigate certain deceptive practices of ad blockers.
It is not just publishers who are vulnerable to these trade practices, and we encourage our partners across the industry to seek out opportunities to oppose them.
Five points then:
We have to clean up our own act as an industry.
We must develop digital advertising which is valuable and a pleasure to consume.
We must make sure our users understand the link between ad revenue and high quality content.
There is evidence that many users will respond to the right messages about ad blocking.
We must fight the unacceptable and deceptive business practices associated with some ad blockers.
Ad blocking is undeniably a challenge – I wouldn’t have said what I have this morning if it wasn’t – but let me finish by putting it into perspective.
We’re still certain that digital advertising will play a critical and positive role in our future success. As you’ve heard, we’re pivoting our ad business towards less intrusive, leaner, inline display; branded content; bold new smartphone executions, video, virtual reality and other kinds of visual storytelling. We believe that right now we’re offering our users the best digital advertising experiences in the history of digital publishing.
We’re already seeing tangible results – revenue from smartphone advertising, for instance, grew 149% year over year in the first quarter of the year – but the best is still to come.
So let’s take firm action on ad blocking. But let’s also unlock the full creative and economic potential of our ability to bring great content, great users and great creative advertisers together. Thank you.
Publishers, platforms, and industry groups gathered together last month for the third time to discuss the continued threat of ad blocking. Attendees included ESPN, the Guardian and Google to name a few. The meeting was organized by Johnny Ryan, the head of ecosystem at PageFair, a company that builds technology to by-pass ad blocking, and Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, an industry trade association for quality digital content companies. Though the meeting was private, the participants agreed to share the seven takeaways to best deal with the risk of ad blocking
On the blocked web, the user must have immediate tools to reject and to complain about advertising. There needs to be a set of tools and choices for consumers to provide feedback to advertisers especially offering feedback in real-time to address a particular problem or concern with advertising.
Rather than restore all ads on the blocked web, only a limited number of premium advertising slots should be restored. This will make a better impact for brands, clean up the user experience, and incentivize better creative. Publishers need to offer few and better ads. In doing so they will provide the consumer with a better online experience.
The blocked web may provide the opportunity to establish a new form of above-the-line advertising. Advertising must be less intrusive and complement the consumer’s digital experience, not disrupt it.
Contextual targeting can be used on the blocked web to establish ad relevance if other forms of tracking are not practical or desirable.
On the blocked web, where third-party tracking is largely blocked, publishers can create new value by engaging with their users to elicit volunteered data. Publishers should find alternative methods to obtain consumer details such as offering a valued exchange for personal information such as customized content, newsletters and/or exclusive promotions.
Measuring advertising success on the blocked web with broader top-of-funnel metrics may incentivize buyers to focus on value rather than cheapness. Importantly, publishers must work with marketers to ensure they recognize the value of engaged consumers and trusted publishers. Introducing new measurements such as an attention metrics, will further advance digital media advertising effectiveness.
On the web as a whole, there should be a maximum page load time standard that publishers and advertisers both commit to. The digital media experience should be a positive consumer experience.
The seven recommendations identify the most effective ways to improve the consumer experience on publisher sites and thwart the adoption of ad blocking. Further, communicating to consumers on changes and new implementations will be key to rebuilding their trust for a restored and stronger relationship with publishers.
According a recent report in the New York Times, the majority of new online advertising revenue—85%—will go to two companies: Google and Facebook. While these companies have consumer-facing services, the reason they dominate the digital advertising ecosystem is because of the technology and algorithms they employ as third parties. Third parties collect data about consumers yet have no direct relationship with them. In addition, those people usually have no idea that their data is being collected.
When you consider that direct response ads represent nearly two thirds of digital advertising and these companies only get paid when consumers click on ads it’s no wonder we see the digital experience dominated by annoying, intrusive, and crappy ads.
And how are consumers reacting to this situation? As TRUSTe has noted, clearing cookies is still the primary method employed by consumers to protect their privacy. However, clearing cookies has detrimental effects to the user experience such as requiring consumers to log in every time they revisit a site which then makes the stalking, creepy ads come back even more. Yet they still clear cookies because it’s one of the main tools they know about to prevent being tracked. In this dysfunctional dynamic, big data is being used to drive down costs of serving targeted ads rather than drive up relevance to the consumer.
A few years ago, consumers started activating their Do Not Track (DNT) signals in an effort to express a choice, even though there was no industry standard yet. As Doc Searls plotted out, the number of DNT signals declined at the same time that the number of consumers with ad blockers started climbing. It’s not a coincidence – consumers have been looking for easy ways to express choice. If this continues, publishers won’t be able to fund quality content like this piece about the early season slide of the Yankees.
It’s interesting that our members are having some success asking consumers to turn off their ad blockers in order to access the content they love. The conversation goes something like this:
Website owner: Hi loyal reader, would you pretty please turn off your ad blocker or whitelist this site? We need advertising revenue to pay for quality journalism.
About 40% of consumers: Sure! I love you guys.
The remaining 60% of consumers: Meh. I’m gonna go look elsewhere for that story about Trump. I really, really hate those annoying ads on those other crappy sites I visit.
My take on this is that consumers understand premium experiences and are willing to view advertising in exchange. But, the value proposition gets out of whack when there’s no transparency for the consumer and the experience is poor.
Meanwhile, advertisers aren’t happy either. As the ANA pointed out, $7.2 billion was lost to fraud last year. They’ve been paying for ads that aren’t even viewable. There are also huge concerns about the inability to fully document where all of their digital advertising dollars are going. In short, there’s a lack of transparency and trust for advertisers. Sound familiar?
So, how does our industry find its footing again? We’ve got to be more clear with consumers about the value proposition and provide them with easy ways to express choice over ubiquitous data collection. By putting consumers first, we also force the issue on ad fraud, viewability and accountability. Every company involved in the digital advertising supply chain would have to justify how it’s adding to the overall value proposition. They would need to “put in more value” than they “take out” – the best way to build trust.
The FCC recently proposed privacy rules for broadband providers that aim to give consumers more control. The problem is that this only applies to ISPs – not all of the other entities that relentlessly track consumers around the web. And, government regulation often becomes outdated very quickly – market solutions or real industry self-regulation are far more able to adapt to new business models and practices. Maybe the FCC proceeding will lead to a new conversation within industry.
With the growing market of Internet of Things, immersive experiences and connected world we live in, the strains on trust between advertisers, consumers and publishers are only going to get worse. We need to find the right balance of providing consumers with transparency and real choices. Consumers are looking for a better experience. Advertisers are demanding fairness. And, I would like to live in a world where I can read all about how badly the Yankees are playing.
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.
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:
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.
We’ve made it through the first stage of the “ad block wars.”
Last September, we issued our Call to Think: Advertising 2.0. We see ad blocking as an industry-wide issue in which everyone has played a part. We weren’t exaggerating when we said that Advertising 1.0 created a downward spiral that will ultimately destroy itself. We asked for ideas and we asked for leadership. Within weeks we began to hear from entrepreneurs and companies seeking to help solve this problem. Step one is admitting there is a problem — and many have. Those who still don’t think there is a problem, feel free to stop reading and go find some sand.
Our research and education efforts kicked off last December with the 2015 DCN Consumer Ad Block Report, which is packed full of consumer and industry insights and the Consumer Rules event in D.C. The conversation at the event, like at all DCN events, focused on what is truly “next” — rebuilding consumer trust — and ended with a fabulous discussion with Julie Brill, former Commissioner of the FTC (the main protection authority for consumers). Brill has long predicted that consumers would take matters into their own hands if the industry didn’t pay attention to their needs and expectations.
From day one, we’ve made it clear ad blocking is a consumer issue. Thus, energy should be spent on understanding the frustrations of the consumers (aka “blockers”) and on improving the experience, security and privacy of the web and apps. We’ve continued to call for investment in creative and we’ve called for consumer choice and respect. We believe smart solutions start with publishers and advertisers who have the direct, trusted relationship with consumers.
To be clear, one reason ad blocking software exists is because some people simply don’t like advertising. They never have and they never will. In a healthy advertising ecosystem, we wouldn’t regard the behavior of this small sub-set of consumers as destructive of the premium content brands. However, over the past decade, it has grown well beyond the perennial group of ad-avoiders, as bad actors in the ecosystem destroyed the privacy and usability principles that consumers expect. Ad blocking has grown a dramatic 48% from July 2014 to June 2015 surpassing 15% of all U.S. consumers. It has now become an existential threat to our members. Clearly, we have a system-wide problem that must be addressed directly with consumers.
In addition to the consumer, there’s another voice that needs to be heard: That of the ad blocking software companies. It may be tempting to vilify them as a class, but this won’t get us far. This is an opportunity to separate those attempting to put more trust into the ecosystem versus those taking it out — and not under their terms. Each is unique and there are literally hundreds of players in the mix. Some are non-profits and others are pure capitalists. Many pitch their solutions as privacy tools while others simply focus on cutting out ads. Some have socialistic policies while others are (perhaps validly) called “financial rackets.” This may be controversial to say but I’m not sure the business model is the most paramount issue. We can all agree that ad blocking software is eating advertisers’ and publishers’ lunch. What is clear is that they exist as a result of consumer demand. They have surpassed 200 million active “blockers” for a reason.
So here is what I want to do, as we seek to inform intelligent actions that will address ad blocking:
I’m inviting every shade of ad block solutions company to “Meet the Blockers,” a DCN Next: Conversation event in New York City on May 16, 2016. Your voice will be heard by the top 75 publishers in the industry. Everyone will get an equal say, but I’m not looking for a product pitch or some kind of bake-off.
I’m asking the ad blocking companies to tell us: 1) why you think you’re a solution for consumers, 2) how your success impacts publishing; and 3) how you think publishers should adapt to succeed with a growing number of frustrated consumers. You must understand that your short-term wins may lead to long-term media destruction, to the loss of household and loved brands if we cannot find solutions.
Given the fact that many enable ad-blocking functionality, browsers are also invited, including Google, Microsoft and Safari. We want to hear from Brendan Eich, the founder of Javascript and Mozilla and, most recently, a new ad-blocking browser called Brave that purports to deliver revenue back to publishers (although some vehemently reject the idea arguing that it forces a new model upon publishers). Brendan will be there. We also want to hear from privacy-focused organizations like disconnect.me, EFF and Ghostery.
We’d like to hear from Mozilla, one of the most innovative leaders of the open web, who just launched Focus, their first blocker. And PageFair, which has arguably been the leading voice on this issue with its inaugural research in 2014. And how about Optimal, a start-up working on a subscription model for ad block users? Maybe HAVN, a new company looking to replace ad units with social posts. Or Crystal, one of the newer apps built for iOS … we’re going to try our best to accommodate as many voices as possible. Make no mistake, these products range from destructive to inspiring but lines aren’t being drawn for this forum. The floor is yours.
…we even want to hear the latest from the “big bad” Adblock Plus. So reach out to me. Because if you are meeting a customer demand, we need to understand the underlying issues that you attempt to address, and how we move forward in a way that supports consumers’ interests, and the best interests of the industry.
Julie Brill has been an unwavering advocate for the consumer during her time as FTC Commissioner. DCN had the privilege of hosting her at ourevent last December “The Consumer Rules: Lessons From Ad Blocking” where I interviewed her on everything from the definition of consumer harm to the notion that privacy today is more about controlling who you communicate with — and how — than seclusion.
Hindsight is 20/20 but many of her concerns over the years related to privacy and consumer trust in the digital ecosystem have come true with the advent of major issues like ad blocking. I look forward to seeing where her expertise and focus on consumers and privacy takes her as she re-enters the private sector.
Quality over quantity is key to preserving the native greenfield opportunity
This year’s Industry Preview highlighted how far “in-feed monetization” has strayed from its “native advertising” origins, and the risks this practice poses to publishers. To the non-discerning eye, these two tactics might seem similar, either because they spawn from the same ad placement, or because in-feed providers exploit subtle nuances within the native advertising category.
Whatever the reason, publishers under pressure to make revenue goals must understand the differences and the long-term consequences of short-term compromises. By embracing and diligently applying a “quality over quantity” approach to what they permit into their editorial feed, publishers will safely navigate through an increasingly volatile digital ecosystem and watchful regulatory environment.
Defining and scaling native advertising versus in-feed monetization
Native Advertising: When marketers use publisher storytelling tools to promote and distribute custom brand content the same way site owners publish editorial. In this vein, native advertising is custom brand content promoted in-feed via “native ad units” and consumed on-site via integrated “content landing pages”. The New York Times supports this definition and further clarifies its perspective on true native here.
In-Feed Monetization: When publishers use native ad units to serve “better looking” banners and rich media experiences, or even memes and animated GIFs. In-feed ads use native slots to unexpectedly punt users off of the publisher site on click or rollover, open a new browser window, launch a lightbox ad over the site, autoplay a brand video or any other [Insert creative here]opportunity. IAB Deep Dive on In-Feed Ad Units covers a lot of these.
Scaling native advertising is about aggregating high quality brand content via the direct sales channel and trusted third party demand providers, and using the native canvas in the way it was always intended. As such, and like other hyper premium products, 100% fill is not a realistic expectation and, given today’s native market, is not possible without introducing severely damaging trade-offs.
In contrast, scaling in-feed monetization chases a wholly different definition of scale: achieve 100% fill by cramming in-feed inventory placements with as much paid ad demand as can be sourced. This is a recklessly aggressive monetization tactic that will pollute, and ultimately devalue and destroy the native opportunity for publishers and marketers. Continued in-feed CTR erosion for publishers, and consistently high bounce rates for marketers are clear evidence to this fact.
Considering today’s digital ecosystem and regulatory environment, plus the steep downside to mismanagement, it does not behoove publishers to favor the short-term, incremental revenue of in-feed-monetization without acknowledging the long-term costs.
Consumer experience, ad blocking and the economics of annoying your users
Digital publishers are in the midst of repairing a very broken relationship with consumers. You know things are bad when the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) issues an apology for a decade of forgetting the user, and allowing the business side to steamroll and create an unusable experience for online content consumers.
With consumers actively ignoring online ads since 2007, and global ad blocker adoption approaching 200MM monthly active users in June 2015, users are clearly exercising control over their online experience as a result of frustration. The importance of reinforcing user trust has never been more critical for media companies, content owners and ad providers. We can’t ignore the numbers, nor can we continue to degrade the digital experience.
Operators tempted by the promise of short-term in-feed revenue should consider this 2014 survey that reveals consumers distrust mismatched ad formats in the feed as much as they distrust banners, and the knock on effect erodes trust in surrounding editorial, or this Microsoft study that concludes user dropout and site abandonment resulting from annoying ads ends up costing publishers more money than they earn. The study urges publishers to consider the more subtle and long-term effects that annoying ads have on user retention and revenue. This sentiment is even more critical when it comes to content, the last piece of real estate on which consumers actually place value and willingly give their attention.
The Federal Trade Commission and risk of deceptive ads
The FTC doesn’t issue a policy statement and business guide without the full intention of enforcing it. No less than 3 months later we’ve seen our first perp walk, a settlement that could end up costing Lord & Taylor $800k (not to mention the damage that deceptive practices do to consumer trust). Safe to say unrestrained in-feed monetization practices easily qualify as a fast follower. So, before publishers contemplate the dangers of OpenRTB and programmatic native monetization, they first have to understand which types of in-feed ads expose them to risk and increase the likelihood of potential government scrutiny.
Quality over quantity as the way forward
Native advertising is a bright light of hope. It brings a return to solution selling for publishers, and unlocks a massively effectively brand storytelling solution for digital marketers. When properly administered, native allows publishers and marketers to authentically tap into the scarce reserve of consumer attention, which in turn drives amazing effectiveness and upholds premium pricing and packaging flexibility. Native is proven to uplift the entire digital ad portfolio and preserve long-term monetization integrity, rewarding marketers with superior engagement and meaningful consumer connection.
It’s imperative that publishers exercise patience as the supply of high quality native demand grows. They must withstand short-term revenue temptation from in-feed opportunities whose ad experience exports consumer trust with every click, exposes publishers to dangerous business risk and legal implication, and hacks away at the foundation of their entire digital business—the editorial feed. The solution is clear: publishers must adopt a quality over quantity strategy to protect authenticity and receptiveness to engage in the feed, preserve the user experience and reinforce trust. In doing so, they safeguard native’s greenfield opportunity and in large part their future.
Chris Rooke is Senior Vice President of Strategy and Operations at Nativo, a native advertising platform for brand advertisers and publishers. A 20 year digital media and ad technology veteran and thought leader, Chris has led significant innovations in digital marketing, consumer engagement, and publisher monetization. Prior to Nativo, Chris served as SVP Global Business Development at true[X], where he built and led teams responsible for programmatic and platform sales, publisher development, demand sales, and client services. And, before his tenure at true[X], Chris served as senior executive at CBS.
In addition, the shift to mobile directly attributed to the increased use of smartphones to access news and the decreased use of desktops. Demographically, younger consumers prefer mobile for news access while older consumers look to desktop and tablet. Across multiple countries, over half (53%) reported that they use a smartphone to access news. Interestingly, consumers who report mainly using their smartphones to access news stories, do so by entering social media sites versus a branded website or app. Apps have become an impactful tool to send alerts and notifications to attract consumers and to bring them more regularly to the branded website.
The consumer adoption of ad blocking software is a most challenging problem for digital publishers, especially for those heavily dependent on advertising revenue. Of those that currently use an ad-blocker, the majority do so on a desktop with only about 8% do so on mobile. In addition, about one-third of consumers in Germany, UK, and the U.S. plan to install an ad-blocker on their smartphones in the next 12 months.
Native Advertising: When marketers use publisher storytelling tools to promote and distribute custom brand content the same way site owners publish editorial. In this vein, native advertising is custom brand content promoted in-feed via “native ad units” and consumed on-site via integrated “content landing pages”. The New York Times supports this definition and further clarifies its perspective on true native