Adpocalypse!

Adpocalypse!
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Highlights

Adpocalypse. One might argue that there are apps and plugins that block these annoyances and ease the website navigation; but that will threaten the advertising revenue of big firms like Google.

After pop-ups, are internet ads the next to disappear?

With websites hosting a range of annoying and irrelevant ads, which slow down browsers and many a time freeze them completely; ad blockers have noticed a considerable increase in usage in recent times

A random visit to any website on the internet will bombard you with numerous ads that keep you waiting for waiting for the main page. Besides, there are videos, which start playing automatically alongside the animated gifs that we don’t want to see most of the time. This is not how a website is supposed to be dynamic.

One might argue that there are apps and plugins that block these annoyances and ease the website navigation; but that will threaten the advertising revenue of big firms like Google. While the situation is not intense yet, there is a need to address the complication; else the situation is just going to get worse for advertisers and publishers.

There are websites, which have initiated the process of reducing the number of ads and filtering them so that the consumers won’t switch to ad blockers, but the process is slower than the pace at which ad blocking reforms are going on. In a new advancement, even Apple has rolled out permissions for apps that will block ads on the browser.

But only a mere five per cent of users have installed it and the rest whom we need to address to, before they switch to ad blockers. The biggest mistake the advertisers and websites did was that they exploited the potential of the medium for advertising. What made it worse was that all this was mostly interruption marketing and not permission marketing.

And if the advertisers and hosts continue their annoying practice of advertising, they will disappear just as pop-up windows did. Every bit of this aggressive advertising is slowing down and sometimes also freezing our browsers, which is not something a consumer would entertain. Getting hammered with stuff you are not interested in is no fun.

With the global usage of ad blockers growing rapidly from 41 per cent to 200 million people now, the annoyance in advertising is eating away on estimated $22 billion ad revenue. For those websites that have realised the magnitude of the problem are formulating a countermeasure for ad blockers. A classic example is the American online streaming company Hulu, which replaced commercials with a message, which prompts the user to turn ad blocker off.

For people who do not wish to do so can pay $12 monthly to go ad-free. This way Hulu’s advertising revenue is not being affected and is just being channelised through an alternate means. Other firms are paying ad blocker developers for buying rights to bypass them. Most of the firms with their source of income being search ads- like Google and Microsoft are the ones paying for these privileges of bypass.

While only the affluent websites can enjoy this privilege, small and budding websites are on the verge of going off-radar and being nullified on the site traffic. Perhaps, there is a need to revolutionise the way websites and web ads work, besides the way they earn a living. But the key point in all this is to cut down on interruption marketing and concentrate on permission marketing this will cease the annoyance of web ads.

By Tushar Kalawatia

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