Reply to post: Re: if people block them...

Revealed: The naughty tricks used by web ads to bypass blockers

Updraft102

Re: if people block them...

There's a bit of a conflict of interest in the web ad industry.

The site owner and the ad company want as many eyes on the ad as possible. The ad company gets paid by the advertiser per view, and the content provider gets paid a percentage of that. It's that dyad that is likely to conspire to put up paywalls and to devise ways to punch through adblockers so they can get paid. If that means annoying the hell out of every single viewer, it doesn't matter as long as they keep getting paid.

The advertiser that pays the ad company, though, doesn't want to infuriate his potential customers. If someone is so adamant about not seeing ads that he would go through the trouble to block them, the advertiser would probably rather not pay to have the ad pushed to that user anyway, given that the odds of a positive outcome (the person buying whatever the advertiser is selling) are pretty minimal at that point. He wants sales, and pays by the ad view only on the assumption that it's a pure numbers game, and that if you double the ad views, you double the sales generated by those ads. That may be true if more views happens because the site doubles in popularity, but if it's because the site and the ad company have defeated some users' adblockers, it probably isn't true anymore.

Boycotting the advertiser, thus, isn't directly hitting the parties guilty of the offenders. It's true that if the advertiser figures out that his own ad company is annoying potential customers, he may terminate his contract with the ad company, and that may have some effect. Still, it's rather nebulous whether web ads work at all anyway, and there's considerable leeway for the ad company to "sell" the advertiser on the idea that if his sales are down, or that they failed to increase as expected, it's because of xyz, and the ads that were pushed by their company kept it from being even worse than it actually was.

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