AD BLOCKERS. a guidebook for publishers, advertisers and Internet users

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Ad blockers - a white paper by Secret Media - 2014

AD BLOCKERS

a guidebook for publishers, advertisers and

Internet users

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[ This white paper describes the way

ad blockers work,

their

recent

growing user base

, and the

consequences

for media

publishers whose

business model

rely on advertising. ]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Ad blockers are a variety of technologies and devices (both hard- and

software) aiming at preventing ads to be called by ad servers and displayed

on Internet users’ browsers when they visit webpages.

Once an open-source project inside Mozilla, numerous actors now provide

ad blocking solutions, the leader being AdBlock Plus. Their intentions shifted

from a desire to create better ads to the creation of a market for whitelisted

ads.

The use of ad blockers is not an isolated phenomenon. Recent figures show

that in average, 20% of ads are blocked, which represents a substantial loss

of gain for publishers whose business model rely on advertising.

Overcoming ads being blocked is nearly impossible since the ad blocking

technology is based on open-source code and a database of blacklisted ads

called EasyList fed by a large and dynamic community of contributors.

A raise of awareness coming from visitors cannot overcome the threat to

online medias’ business model since users are not willing to pay for content.

Paying for being whitelisted by ad blockers is a risky solution, since

conditions and results are obscure.

Secret Media is a New-York based startup providing a reliable and

long-lasting solution to bypass ad blockers. It does not rely on a technology that

EasyList can block and shows a strong commitment to elevate the general

quality of contents on the web.

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ADBLOCKERS REPRESENT A VARIETY OF

TECHNOLOGIES

AND

ACTORS ALL BASED ON

CROWD SOURCING

Ad blockers can be both installed on hardware devices and Internet browsers.

Ad blockers like AdBlock Plus can be installed on desktop Internet browsers via any browser’s store or the ad blocker providers’ websites in just a few seconds - and for free. The simplicity of installation has only improved in the past few months. A study by Clarity Ray1_{revealed that}

Firefox’s users are the most keen on using ad blocking addons – the AdBlock project was initiated on Firefox - followed by Safari and Google Chrome.

Ad blockers can also take the form of a hardware device to plug on an Internet router; this method is more common on enterprises’ routers – for companies that do not want their employees to access some Internet services. Tools like AdTrap2

can be used to block ads on multiple devices working on the same Internet connexion – including mobile phones, which do not have browser extensions.

The French TelCo pure player Free recently hit the headlines by adding an ad blocker on its latest “Freebox” release, causing a general uprising from both website publishers and Free

1_{Clarity Ray ‘Ad-blocking, measured’:}

clarityray.com/Content/ClarityRay_AdBlockReport.pdf 2_{See getadtrap.com}

users who did not make the choice to block ads.

Numerous ad blocker technologies are based on open-source code and are fuelled by a collaborative database of ads.

There are a myriad of ad blockers, either hard- or soft-ware, yet one clear leader distinguishes itself: AdBlock Plus, the emanation from the original project (see next chapter). Anyone can have access to the source code online3_{, making}

ad blockers replicable endlessly.

Despite the number of different actors providing ad blocking solutions, the source for ad tracking is a collaborative database called EasyList. It gathers a list of regular expressions, sequences of code written to spot keywords or frameworks inside a webpage.

Contributors to EasyList spot these sequences of words (for instance, webpages all containing “ad/…”), submit them to the community who confirms it’s needed to be blocked. The size and reactivity of EasyList’s community is so

important – 80,000 regular expressions, and counting - that it has become the number 1 reference for ad blockers.

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COMPANIES BEHIND ADBLOCKERS: INTENTIONS AND

REALITIES

The birth of the ad block project and the shift from “better ad” to “stop ad”

From a historical point of view, “AdBlock” was an open source project created by a community of developers inside the Mozilla project in 2002. The philosophy was to regulate online

advertising because it had become too intrusive. Distinct organizations forked from the AdBlock project such as the leader AdBlock Plus – created in 2006 - or other companies (software publishers, security companies, etc).

Noble intentions to build a better web shifted;

first because ad blocker actors saw business opportunities: if blocking ads creates a revenue shortfall for publishers, then they become in need for “whitelisting”. Secondly, the project became more “hardcore” because the

community of developers was galvanized around the intellectual challenge to track all ads, even hidden ones – like mathematicians would be around a complicated equation.

Consequently, ad blockers bloomed to fight against “intrusive ads” by blocking all of them, without offering a counter-proposition to finance web contents.

The definition of “intrusive ad” is unclear and irrelevant

The definition of “intrusive ads”, as per written on AdBlock Plus manifesto4_{, not only is vague}

but also lacks relevance:

Adjectives like “annoying” and “appropriate” can be misleading. For instance, ads that are

4_{https://acceptableads.org/fr/}

plain text are considered non intrusive because they are discreet. Yet, they can be very bad quality and often times, they are generated by Google, who keeps on collecting private data while displaying so-called “non intrusive ads”. The main issue with non-intrusiveness is that it focuses on the format instead of focusing on the content. If ad blockers wanted to get rid of low-quality ads, they would identify all the ad campaigns and have the community assess their content. Instead, they identify regular

expressions: this amounts to attacking the website publisher instead of the ad.

Ad blockers block more than ads

Ad blockers remove elements from the display of webpages (HTML, CSS or URL calls), all defined by the EasyList community as coming from an ad server. Consequently, they can remove other elements that are not ads: sharing links and other widgets – a lot of publishers, willingly or not, go through ad servers to display them.

GOOGLE’S POSITION ON ADBLOCKERS

Ads generated by Google are part of the few that are whitelisted by AdBlock Plus based on the fact that the basic format for Google Ads is purely text, therefore non intrusive. This

situation creates a distortion in the advertising market: displays generated through ad blockers are 100% human – and not robot – and since these humans are not exposed to other ads, there are all the more captive, making Google able to dictate prices.

From Google’s point of view, ad blockers

should grow in order to consolidate its position. However, Google took a strong position in the other direction last year by banning ad blockers from Android stores1_{arguing they were against} Android rules.

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Ad blockers - a white paper by Secret Media - 2014 Ad blockers also remove sponsored content or

“native advertising”, which are ads specifically created to bring high-quality content to a

specific publisher: they can be articles, videos or a series of webpages that are considered by the publisher and the readers as content, and considered by ad blockers as intrusive ads. Ad servers are also used to display

self-promotion links to subscribe to the website, and recommendation widgets (“Most commented”, “most shared”, etc.): removing them impacts the reading comfort for visitors and the conversion rate for the freemium websites. Even some graphic elements of webpages go through ad servers. Ad blockers can

consequently “disrupt or distort the page or content we’re trying to read”, as they claim they fight against in their manifesto.

ADBLOCKERS’

BUSINESS

MODEL

Reduced costs

First of all, costs are reduced by the fact that the technology is open-source and collaborative and by the fact that distribution comes with no cost for the browser add-on – hardware

production and distribution are higher for devices, and null for browser extensions.

First source of funds: crowdfunding

Ad blockers are backed by a strong community of believers that the Internet should exist without ads; a lot of them donate money to support the cause. The company AdBlock – that provides Chrome ad blockers – ran a crowdfunding campaigns backed by almost 3500 participants and raised $65k for a pledge of $25k.5_The

campaign not only aimed at funding AdBlock

5_{See the campaign : https://campaign.getad} block.com/ad block-it-s-time-to-spread-the-word

but also to raise users’ awareness on the anti-ad cause.

Premium plans for publishers

Finally, companies emanating from the original ad block project saw the obvious business opportunity to have publishers pay to be white-listed (see more in chapter 6).

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A

GROWING USERBASE

WITH MOTIVATIONS UNCLEAR

Google Trend: the evolution of the interest in “ad block” from 2005 to 2014

There are no official statistics on the number of ad blockers’ users nor is there any way to have a reliable assessment. Ad blockers’ providers are too numerous and too diverse (from browser extensions to devices installed on companies’ servers – see more in chapter 1) to provide a clear volume of users.

In addition, there were no polls ran on a world-basis to know more about ad blockers’ users motivations – all the more since some users are unaware they are using ad blockers.

Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn from several studies and figures quoted in this white paper.

Ad blockers benefit from a growing user base

AdBlock Plus claims to have been downloaded 200 million times. AdBlock reached the limit of the Chrome Store active user meter (10 million), making it impossible to assess the actual number of users.

An extensive study ran by Clarity Ray in 20126

revealed that an overall 9,36% of impressions were blocked (in Europe and the US).

A lot can change in two years on the Internet. Analysing Google Trends reveals that the

6_{Read the full study :}

http://clarityray.com/Content/ClarityRay_AdBlockRep ort.pdf

interest for the word “ad block” has been multiplied by 4 between May 2012 and May 2014.

During the beta-testing phase of Secret Media (see more in chapter 6), ads were inserted inside publishers’ webpages and then tracked to check that they were blocked, before inserting

unblockable ads instead, using Secret Media’s technology. These tests revealed that an overall 20% of ads are blocked.

A typical ad blocker user: a tech-savvy European Internet user running on Linux

The Clarity Ray study revealed figures on ad blockers users following several factors.

First, the content of the website influences a lot the proportion of impressions blocked – see table below.

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Geographically speaking, Eastern Europeans seem keener on ad blockers’ use.

Finally, the study revealed that users running on Linux and Ubuntu were far more eager on using ad blockers than users running on other

operating systems.

Diverse motivations for choosing ad block

Internet users are more and more tired of low quality and un-skippable ads online. However, this general idea cannot give a clear view on the true motivations to use ad blockers.

Ad block users are choosing to install ad block as a reaction to low-quality ads they see on

some websites; they would probably not have been exposed to such ads on premium websites, which do not want to deceit their audience. Yet, once ad block is installed, it blocks any ad on any website – most providers offer the possibility to manually add white-listed websites, yet it requires a whole procedure from the user’s part. Consequently, it is today hard to tell whether ad blocker users would overall approve high-quality ads on premium websites, since most of them do not realize the difference between them and low-quality ads.

Misunderstanding between ads and private data

Ad block users’ motivations seem to fall within the broad trend of fear of private data use. There is a confusion between being exposed to advertisement, seeing ads that are targeting users using historical data (which websites are visited, etc.), having private data collected for marketing purpose (name, address, age, etc.) and having private data collected for national security purpose.

It is true that ad blockers can prevent to some extent the gathering of private data. Yet, it is rather an edge effect than the original purpose and can be easily bypassed.

Users unaware of using ad blocker

One should note that a portion of ad blockers’ users is using them unwillingly. It is the case for employees of companies imposing ad blockers on their servers, clients of Internet providers adding ad blockers on their routers (as

mentioned in chapter 1), or clients of anti-virus solutions setting ad blocking options by default.

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A

THREATENING

IMPACT ON

PUBLISHERS’

BUSINESS MODEL

Misunderstanding and impossibility to measure the impact of ad blockers for publishers

Most publishers think that ads are simply

masked but that impressions are still counted. In reality, the code of the page is modified so that ad servers are not even called: ads simply do not appear in the structure of the page.

It is basically impossible to realize the loss of traffic using basic tools like Google analytics or Xiti because the majority of ad blockers also block the counting of visitors, making it

impossible to compare pageviews with ad server pageviews. Therefore, publishers do not realize how threatening ad blockers really are for their business models.

Certain tools offer widgets that are supposed to help publishers understand better their loss in impressions, like Blockalyzer7_{, an ad block}

counter for Wordpress. Tools like Blockalyzer implement scripts that will knowingly be blocked by ad blockers and measure the delta. The only issue is that these scripts themselves are

detected and added to Easylist. Ad blockers can destroy these counting scripts and prevent them to collect data.

Publishers broadcasting videos are able to have a better idea of the amount of impressions that are blocked: since robots cannot simulate the bandwidth’s consumption, its measurement can give publishers a better idea of ad blocking rate.

Ads are the #1 source of funds for medias

Even if ad blockers claim that they only prevent intrusive advertising to be exposed, they represent a real threat for publishers’ business model. Advertisement has proven to be the only viable business model for online media.

7_{http://webgilde.com/en/blockalyzer/}

The startup PageFair8_{tried to offer a counter}

model. It provided publishers a tool to offer visitors to pay for an online content instead of enjoying it for free. The proportion of users who shifted from the free to the paying option was 0,3%.

A study by E-marketer9_{revealed that advertising}

got publishers a total of $42 billion in 2013, only in the U.S. It represents a total of $168 per American, an amount that most users would never imagine to pay to consume contents on the web.

The threat has become so important that it causes strong reactions from several actors in the web industry. Mike Zaneis, an EVP at the

Interactive Advertising Bureau declared in an interview: "Ad blocking to me is so

fundamentally wrong, it just boils my blood."

Lowered and blurred reach for brands and e-commerce

8_{http://pagefair.com/}

9 http://www.emarketer.com/Article/US-Total-Media-Ad-Spend-Inches-Up-Pushed-by-Digital/1010154

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Saying that 20% of webpages are ad blocks means that 20% of visitors do not see the ads on this webpage. In other words, 20% of the market opportunities disappear. For brands, it means two things. First, that they cannot reach potential customers with traditional advertising, which is a

very important issue, especially for retailers who are using ads to inform potential customers on their products. Secondly, it creates a distortion on the amount of population that was

supposedly reached on a specific medium.

SOLUTIONS

EMERGING FOR PUBLISHERS

Since transforming non-paying users into subscribers seems highly unlikely, especially since ad blockers can also block self-promotion widgets, what solutions do publishers have?

Pay to be whitelisted: why it is not recommended

• Ad block’s business model relies on

making publishers pay to be whitelisted (see chapter 3). Consequently, paying to be whitelisted amounts to give up to the ad blocker’s model.

• On top of that, companies behind ad

blockers remain obscure and there are no real guarantee that a website will actually be whitelisted, since there is no way to measure it properly (see chapter 4).

• Each ad blocker owns a certain market

share and none of them reveals them, making it impossible for publishers neither to choose a relevant one nor to judge if prices are appropriate.

• Finally, ad blockers are so numerous that

there are a lot of phishing companies hiding behind the name “ad block”.

Encourage your users to uninstall ad block

Publishers can either get a widget that detects if your visitors and using an ad blocker – like AdUnblock10_{- or set up a default message. Yet}

results might not be important enough to make a true difference (see previous chapter). Besides, each time a new solution for preventing ad block

10_{http://adunblock.com/}

is created, the EasyList community reacts by adding it to the blacklist.11

Use Secret Media to bypass ad blockers and measure your gains

Secret Media provides a solution to bypass ad blockers that does not rely on a script; therefore the EasyList community cannot overcome it. The technology used by Secret Media makes sure that each ad gets a specific URL that cannot be nor found not added to EasyList by the community.

In order to ensure results, Secret Media also measures properly the delta between impressions blocked and viewed.

Commitments to a smarter and better online content

Secret Media’s main concern remains the wellness of Internet users. The startup’s goal is certainly not to go back to a low-quality

advertisement on the web. Nevertheless, Secret Media acknowledges the business imperatives that online medias are facing today.

The solution provided by Secret Media aims at reconciling high-quality content and smart advertisement.

All publishers working with Secret Media share the startup’s wish to work for making online contents more qualitative and always accessible to everyone without trading off Internet users’ comfort and privacy.

11_{extract from the EasyList forum (in french)}

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