There’s been a bit of an arms race between ad blocking users, content providers and advertisers. As ad blockers rise in popularity, revenue goes down for content providers. Content providers tend to resort to more obtrusive ads, hoping to garner more clicks from those users not utilizing blockers. They may put clickable content (like a next button) too close to the ad so misclicks turn to ad clicks. Or they do growing interstitial ads that block the content until the user is forced to interact with the ad. From the advertisers prospective, misclicks are worse than no clicks. They cost the advertiser money for little gain as the user wasn’t actually interested in the ad in the first place. As a result, the advertiser offers lower rates, reducing the content provider’s revenue further. The more annoying the ads, the more likely users are to turn to ad blockers in the first place. Things have gotten out of hand, and no one wins in this scenarios. The user has a terrible experience. The advertiser gets the wrong king of visitors. While the content provider may make money initially, over time he or she makes less and less as he or she drives more people to use adblockers.

I am not a fan of adblockers, but I recognize why some users are. In my world view, it’s the content owner’s responsibility to ensure a reasonable user experience, and that includes the ads the user sees. I intend to do my part to stay out of the arms race, even if that means less revenue.

With that in mind I’ve been thinking about my own ad policy:

No Misclicks and no Trick Clicks

I used to love the game Robot Unicorn Attack on my phone. I played it daily. Nicki loved it too, referring to it as “the horsie game.”

Aside: A great way for a scrupleless developer to make a quick buck? Write a ad supported toddler game app with ads on the screen the toddler sees. If there’s a button the’ll find it and click on it. You don’t even need to be sneaky with ad placement.

When you inevitably died the game gave you the option of using a fairy tear to continue your life. You clicked “yes” to continue, “no” to move on to the next life. At some point they moved the “no” button to the bottom of the screen and put a “watch a 30 second ad clip instead” option in it’s place. After one too many misclicks I uninstalled the game from my phone and quit cold turkey. Since my terms of service disallow adblockers, I certainly can’t fault anyone from quitting me cold turkey if I tried something similar!

As a content provider I promise to make all advertisements obvious, and will design my apps in such a way that any ad click is more than likely an intentional ad click.

Limited Ads

In order to test my ad blocking detection script, I needed to download an install an adblocker. By default I turned it off, but every time my browser restarted the ad blocker also restarted. This particular ad blocker would show how many ads it blocked on each page. The record was 49 on a news website. Forty-nine. I had no idea.

Of course there’s a big difference between news websites and my apps. Lengthy articles have more space for ads. I try and keep my apps contained within a single screen, so I couldn’t fit that many ads in, evening ignoring my first pledge.

Right now I’m limiting myself to just one or two banner ads.

Possible Revenue Alternatives

A common defense of adblocking users is that they weren’t going to click on ads anyway, so what difference does it make? This argument is based on the inaccurate assumption that adviews don’t earn revenue. They do! To be fair it’s rather small.

Some websites allow for users to donate money instead of viewing ads. Others allow other currency in lue of ads; such as a share of social media or subscribing. When I get larger I may consider the former option. If you want to speed up the process, you can consider Google Contributor. You pay a small monthly fee to contributor. Contributor blocks some of the google adsense ads you would have seen, and uses your monthly fee to pay the content provider as though you had seen the ad.

Posted in Internet & Technology | Tags: Adblocker, Sarahsoft