Tacky mobile ad networks could kill publishing, survey shows As if they haven't got enough to worry about: magazines and newspapers are seeing audiences migrate to mobile, but the advertising revenues they need to keep their publications running just aren't following. Traditionally, advertising eventually catches up with where the audience is – but on mobile, it hasn't. The anxiety is …
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We have all seen the little adverts punted on the various apps.
With a 5 inch screen, these just make us use apps without adverts or just not use the apps at all.
As a mobile user, why the hell would I want adverts in my face when I pay monthly for my mobile?
Advertisers are stuffed here im afraid, intrude in my tiny screen and the product will be blacklisted by me as annoying (if I can even see what the product is)
So even if they CAN get the advert to me, its going to have the opposite affect to the one they want.
You can download a custom hosts file for Android from various places (there are also apps on the Play store or whatever it's called now that will generate and install one for you). These will cause any requests to the IP addresses of ad networks to be redirected into the ether.
You won't see any ads in your browser or in apps. It's preferable to flight mode because you can still receive calls whilst playing Angry Birds.
"As a mobile user, why the hell would I want adverts in my face when I pay monthly for my mobile?"
I pay monthly for the Internet but I don't expect the services that can be accessed via it to all be free. It's like saying "I pay road tax, give me a free car" or for a more appropriate analogy "I pay for my Internet access, Amazon, you shouldn't be charging me for this book".
Ever considered that the public is sick and tired of adverts ? The first thing most savvy web users do is install AdBlock on their browser. Indeed, it was one of the first addons available for Firefox on the Nexus 7. Next thing a savvy user will do is get root on their devices to block other adverts.
Astroturfing .. paid adverts .. sponsored TV programmes .. shill reviews .. the list is endless and it's the usual suspects: multinationals, Big Corp flogging the same old rubbish.
What's to be done ? David Leigh him out of the 70's (massive hair, brown leather jacket with the collar UP LOL) is suggesting today in the Graun that there ought to be a universal broadband tax of £2 per user ostensibly to prop up left wing prop rags like, you guessed it, The Graun, which is losing millions of pounds per year peddling tired old sub sixth form left wing prop.
Advertisers only have themselves to blame that people wont tolerate them on computing devices. People are perfectly okay with them in print and on TV, but on computing devices, as the article rightly points out, people have had their fingers burnt. Everyone has either been infected with malware themselves, or knows someone who has been; everyone has heard horror stories about someone who clicked on an advert and suddenly got themselves a multi-thousand dollar bill.
And their constant dragging of the feet over things like op-out provisions and Do-Not-Track options hasn't helped their image one bit.
They are going to have to work very hard to rehabilitate their image, it's just unfortunate that content providers are the ones suffering, not the idiots who made the mess in the first place with misleading, obnoxious, and downright stupid online advertising.
I used to pay $100/mo to have 30% of my shows be commercials, and have the plot chopped to hell by interruptions. The ads got so annoying I canceled my cable and haven't watched TV in 4 months now except by putting an eyepatch on, making the parrot sit on my shoulder, and going YARRR!
That's the only recourse I have for TV other than DVRing EVERYTHING and using a skip button. Changing the channel just gets you a different commercial.
On my computing devices I have more control, and things like /etc/hosts, AdBlock+ & AdAway, which I use to the hilt.
The way I see it, magazines and newspapers have all the same content taken from press releases. They might differ in the theme they cover but any single news item is covered in the same way in different papers.
Is it really a surprise that users go to the place where there is less ads?
Bring me some original content with some real research and it doesn't matter if there are ads. I might even click on one of them one day.
Could it be simply that the Ads are craptastic? I'd guess that the advertisers will eventually figure out how to get an add onto a mobile so that people will see them but at the moment most of the comments above show you why it's not working.
I suspect that the truth is that adverts have never worked as well as the vendors claim - it's just so much more obvious now that we're all using smaller screens.
If I want to know about a product, I'll search for it. I am more than happy to pay for apps and content, but any app with intrusive (i.e. any) requests for feedback or ads will get binned plus a bad review. If your business model relies of ads, but you're not useful enough, then too bad.
As for TV, I record everything and skip the ads. And I recycle leaflets in magazines.
It's rather revealing that the moderators don't seem to like it when the excessive advertising on their own website is mentioned and prevent comments about it from being displayed, even though the story itself relates to the failure of online advertising. This website is far from the only one to plaster their site with adverts, but it could well be that this sort of indiscriminate display is a reason why online advertising is failing in the first place.
The reaction of advertisers to people trying to stop themselves from being drowned in advertising seems to be to find new ways of force-feeding them the junk rather than asking themselves why people are avoiding it in the first place. Certainly the route taken by this website seems to be to increase the amount of advertising from time to time rather than perhaps take a step back and look at the reasons why so much effort is made to avoid it. Unless that changes then online advertising will never really succeed.
Currently it would seem that on-line advertising is in for a rough ride. End-users can effectively filter it out and increasingly do, for perfectly good reasons (such as privacy concerns, avoiding annoyance, faster load times, ...). If this means the demise of advertising in general down the line, it might be just as well: advertising is commercial propaganda, where the punter pays for being manipulated and misinformed (as a part of the price of a product or service). Also, it is worth noting that such propaganda undermines the premise of well-informed parties on the 'free market' i.e. in its current form advertising or marketing in general amounts to a serious systemic problem in a market economy.
A related thought: How do you trust a professional propagandist to give you accurate information when buying the services of the same or contemplating doing that?
So if this reply mentions that in many cases a mobile site is ad-free and contains the same basic content as the ad-infested one, does this too get deleted?
At least El Reg's mobile site is vaguely usable. The aforementioned Grauniad, not to mention the Met Office, have appalling mobile versions of their standard content.
I find the adverts occasionally amusing, that's why I mostly don't block them. When they get excessively intrusive, I block them, and have done so here occasionally.
But in general here and elsewhere I see lots of ads still trying to sell me something I bought a few months ago, or to join an ISP I'm already with, or other such money down the drain. My money and your money, mostly. My bandwidth too.
Blipverts, that's what we need. Is Blank Reg here?
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