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Advertisers Should Take Responsibility for Annoying People and Driving Them to Use Ad Blockers

posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 26 2015, @06:12AM   
from the if-they-had-only-listened-before dept.

iWantToKeepAnon writes:

Marketoonist ran a story about marketers saying, "Oops, our bad."

The Interactive Advertising Bureau issued a remarkable mea culpa last week about the state of online advertising. In response to the rise of ad-blocking software, IAB VP Scott Cunningham said digital advertisers should take responsibility for annoying people and driving them to use ad blockers:

"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience....

"We build advertising technology to optimize publishers' yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty...

"The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond."

Nod to pipedot for running this story.

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Original Submission

• Re:Too little, too late Re:Too little, too late (Score: 4, Interesting) by Adamsjas on Monday October 26 2015, @07:23AM

  by Adamsjas (4507) on Monday October 26 2015, @07:23AM (#254563)

  I seriously doubt most sites earn much money from advertising. First, its all pay-per-click these days, at least via Google. People just don't click on ads that much. Having run some hobby sites with google ads, I can tell you that you barely cover your hosting fees.
  Maybe if you can still find a way to get paid by the impression, instead of by the click, you could make more money.

  The thing is, advertising on the vendors own pages, and via search results is all anyone really needs.

  If I'm looking for a new motherboard, or a new car, or a fishing pole, I want to google up some vendors. Even if I don't know the vendor names, (especially if I don't know the vendors), I expect to find them in search engines.

  So Google can still make money. Bing can make money.

  But I agree we could probably do just fine without ads on every random page. If I searched for motherboards, I don't expect motherboards to show up on the side of every third web site I visit for the next week.

  But I do think a lot of little hobby sites would just disappear, or go back into geocities or some place, or ISP free web space. (Remember seeing those tildes in a URLs?).

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:Too little, too late (Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Monday October 26 2015, @02:25PM

  by halcyon1234 (1082) on Monday October 26 2015, @02:25PM (#254681)

  I seriously doubt most sites earn much money from advertising.

  They don't. Which is why I'm baffled by how vehemently some site owners will defend the advertisers. If you have that big of a viewership, a crowdfund will make you orders of magnitude more revenue than advertising will, and it's better for you AND your viewers/customers/whoever. EVERYONE gets screwed by the ad networks:

  1. End user? SCREWED with privacy invasion, annoying ads, security breaches
  2. Site owner? SCREWED by plummeting income by being given less and less money based on any metric. Your users suffer, and your reputation takes the hit whenever "bad" ads get through.
  3. Company looking to advertise a product/service? SCREWED by exorbitant costs to put ads out to people who will most likely ignore it, block it, or actively hate you for showing it. Very little return on investment.

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  Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]

  Parent