ethics of adblock
TRANSCRIPT
ETHICS OF ADBLOCKAlankrit Kharbanda
2011A7PS125P
INTRODUCTION
Online advertising has become an essential cog in advertising and marketing.
Increasing internet penetration and users spending an increasing amount of time on the internet, internet advertisement has become a major revenue garner for online advertisement platforms.
Unlike conventional methods, online advertisement is a very target specific technique and hence costs more to reach out.
MAJOR PLAYERS
Google Adsense
Bing Adwords
Yahoo ! Ads
Baidu
InMobi
REVENUE MODELS FOR WEBSITES
Websites sell their own products (e.g. Etsi.com)
Sell products made by other manufacturers (e.g. amazon.com)
Marketplaces that allow other sellers to sell and gain a commission per sale (e.g. Ebay.com)
Travel portals (e.g. Makemytrip.com)
Advertisement
HOW ADS WORK
Website owners usually sign up with an ad provider such as Google AdSense or Bing adwords. Companies such as google, Facebook and Microsoft have a lot of information about users. As a result they run their ad platforms allowing advertisers to select their target customer base (eg. Indian males living in New Delhi with an interest in music).
When the said user opens the website, Google/Bing ad servers select the most appropriate advertisement and deliver it to the website.
Advertisements in mobile apps function in the exact same way as on a website. The server selects the most appropriate content to be displayed and broadcast it to the given users instance of mobile app.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
For web, most of the advertisements are delivered using JavaScript.
A JavaScript code on the HTML code of the website requests the server for an advertisement and the server delivers it to the page.
This connection is easily observable if one monitors the network traffic over a software such as Wireshark.
For mobile, it may be done using JavaScript or native JAVA API’s, depending on the application.
TYPES OF ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT
Pay Per Click
Pay Per Thousand Impressions(Banner Ads)
Pay per action
Pay per Install
Video Ads
WHY DO PEOPLE USE ADBLOCK
Personalised ads seem as invasion of privacy
Ruin experiences such as watching a video
Website owners flood their pages with ads
Spam ads
Unnecessary popups
HOW ADBLOCK WORKS
Recently many users have started to block advertisements using browser extensions and mobile apps such as Adblock and Adblock plus.
These extensions severe the JavaScript and AJAX based connection of the user computer with the advertisement servers, thus hiding the advertisement from the user.
As a result the part of the page where ad was supposed to be present is now blank.
In mobile, the same is achieved by the app which blocks data retrieval from ad servers.
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Adblock usage in different browsers(million downloads)
Chrome FireFox Opera
ESTIMATED LOSSES
ESTIMATED LOSSES
Using latest statistics, a company like google is the primary search engine for 62% online users.
Using the same estimation, 6.2% online users are google users who use Adblock.
Using the below estimate as average revenue per user, Adblocking costs google approximately 6.2% X3 billion X $29.95= $5.4 billion.
This is an approximation to the amount of money it costs for a single advertiser. However given that not all of Google’s advertisement revenue comes from search and not all people on Adblock block google, the actual figure maybe lower, but not insignificant for sure.
ADBLOCKING AS PIRACY
Piracy is defined as the unauthorized usage of someone else’s work.
By adblocking, one deprives the owner of the website his right to earn from his content.
For e.g. If TVF, a popular online YouTube channel makes a video and publishes it on YouTube, they incur heavy expenses in terms of publicity and production. Similarly YouTube occurs heavy expenses for successfully hosting the video. However if one were to use adblocking software, companies like TVF and YouTube wouldn’t be able to get a return on their investment, which is quiet detrimental to the entire industry.
ADBLOCKING AS PIRACY
Most websites depend on advertisements as primary source of revenue and adblocking deprives them of it.
As a result in some time, lack of revenues may force websites to shut shop. This could possibly lead to another crash in the internet stocks, similar to the one in the dot com bubble burst.
WHITELISTING
Whitelisting is a process by which a particular advertisement provider is declared as “Whitelisted”, i.e. all its advertisement is displayed by default in spite of the user having the Adblock extension.
Both Google and Microsoft have been known to pay Adblock to add them as whitelisted content providers.
Though the user still has an option to turn off all advertisements, but this process is unfair to smaller content providers who do not have the resources to match the bids by giants in the field.
Also it provides unlimited power to extension publishers who could use it in rather unethical ways.
ETHICS OF WHITELISTING
The Internet has always meant to be used in a free and open manner, also known as the concept of Net neutrality. There is no way there should be a monopoly due to unlimited power resting in a few hands. Innovation in web browsing was stalled for a few years after the release of Internet Explorer 6.0 and in no way should the industry have to suffer similarly again.
Given that Net Neutrality has to be maintained, either all or no ads should be whitelisted by default. Such an arrangement would ensure that players stand on equal footing.
CONCLUSION
Net neutrality is essential for the freedom of the web and to maintain that whitelisting and adblocking need to be controlled. This could be done in the following manner:
Permitting users to opt out of personalised ads. Since many users consider personalisation as an invasion to their privacy, removing such ads could be a good start to gain support of the consumers.
Allowing users to choose the type of ads they wish should appear on their feed.
Adopting a common advertising interface for all advertisement providers. Such an interface would allow the user to customize ads more easily. Revenue sharing can be done on a client by client basis.
Increase user incentive in advertisement. For e.g. Provide minutes of free talk time for watching advertisement or installing an app. Such user incentives interest the customer more and ensure increased engagement.
CONCLUSION
Adopting alternate sources of revenue, such as : Subscription model as in case of Netflix, Kindle etc.
Subscription model to remove advertisements on all websites, using a common platform model mention in (3) above.
Introduce more interactive ads, such as a flash game before a video, so that the user could engage with the ad rather than wish to skip it.
Competition has been the key to the insane rise of the tech industry and Adblock is killing it. Tools like Adblock need to be removed, or at least curbed for a more neutral internet.
FUTURE SCOPE
Deeper study into working of social media advertisements.
Deeper study into subscription models
Research on whitelisting and views surrounding it.
CONSTRAINTS
Lack of original data Not possible to conduct a survey with neutral audiences.
Lack of published views from advertisement providers regarding the same.
REFERENCES
Businessinsider
Slideshare
Wikipedia
Bing AdWords
Numerous private blogs