Though many people do not like commercials, advertising is the lifeblood of communications industry. Almost every TV channel, radio station or website makes money by serving ads to the consumers who came for their content. In fact, that massive Google empire is built almost entirely on ads, so it makes sense that Google and other online entities see the rise of ad blockers as a huge threat. Last week, Google announced a plan to tackle ad-blockers on two fronts. One will seek to make it harder to use ad blockers, while the other will introduce Google’s very own ad blocker.
Arguably, the biggest part of Google’s plan to tackle ad blocking is a new system called Funding Choices. Essentially, the website framework will allow a site to detect when someone is using an ab blocker, and gives them a message to either allow ads or pay a fee to view the content.
“As part of our efforts to maintain a sustainable web for everyone, we want to help publishers with good ad experiences get paid for their work,” the company wrote in a blog post explaining the new system. “With Funding Choices, now in beta, publishers can show a customized message to visitors using an ad blocker, inviting them to either enable ads on their site, or pay for a pass that removes all ads on that site through the new Google Contributor.”
In some ways, this is like the subscription services employed by some online news sites. Visitors can see a little of the content they came for, but must then pay (either by allowing ads or paying the fee). Google has been testing Funding Choices for a while, and though it’s still in Beta, the early results have been positive, according to some of the participants.
“Funding Choices allows us to have a conversation with visitors using ad blockers on how our business works, and provide them a choice to whitelist or contribute to our newsroom,” said Marc Boswell from Business Insider. “We’ve found that people are generally open to whitelisting once they understand how content gets created.”
So if you’re an blocker, this sort of payment screen may be coming soon to a website near you. But despite this plan to stop ad blocking, the other part of Google’s scheme seems to be, if you can’t beat them, join them. Google plans to introduce their own ad blocker to Chrome.
This ad blocker wouldn’t block all ads (as noted before, this isn’t in Google’s interest), however it would make block ads that don’t meet a certain quality standard. This would at least make the ad experience more enjoyable for users. Most people have been to a site where multiple video ads start playing, the screen gets taken over by unskippable ads and the like. Google’s ad blocker would reduce the amount of experiences like those website viewers would have.
As the blog post explains, “Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.”
It goes without saying that these efforts will have at least some success, but it will probably be limited. Many content creators have switched to using systems like Patreon to get funding directly from their viewers. If a YouTube creator with 100,000 fans can convince one in 10 of them to give $1 a month, they could make $10,000 a month on top of the ad revenue, without worrying about the percentage of people that use ad blockers.
Additionally, systems like Patreon give more money directly to the content creator. When website owners get money from their ad platform, they are actually only getting part of the money that the website earned. A large portion of it went to the ad network, and the creator gets a share. Google’s fight against ad blocking is less about protecting content creators (who had already figured out a better way than ads alone to fund their work), than more about protecting their ad revenue stream. That said, since the ad revenue stream to the platform content creators use is what keeps the platform operating (paying for YouTube to run isn’t cheap), it’s important than some ad revenue continues to flow.
To read more about recent changes to online marketing platforms, read this article about Google’s and Facebook’s efforts to tackle fake news.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.