Ad Blockers War: It's Impact on the Digital Marketing Industry

© March Oyinki 2016

The digital adverting giant Facebook, is stirring up a storm over Eyeo Ads Blocker for preventing its ads from displaying. The rift between both companies has come to be known as #AdblockWars, and described in some circle as the cat and mouse game, with Facebook being the cat and Eyeo, the mouse. Ironically, since Facebook is a much bigger company, Eyeo is seen as no match in this Ads Blocker War. Media reports are already clearly in favour of Facebook as the likely winner of this war, while the battle is still raging.

What is Ads Blocker?

Doc Searls' articles titled 'Marketing bullshit is a Structured problem' gives an insight into the sordid nature of the battle between advertisers and the public, of which Ads Blocker are of immense value.

By Wikipedia's definition, the term Adblocker, means content filtering and ads blocking extension for web browsers, which allows millions of users every day to prevent page elements, such as advertisements, from being displayed. It is an open source developed by an international community of volunteers. Eyeo GmbH, a German software development company, owned by Wladimir Palant, developed Adblock Plus (ABP). Adblock Plus, which, with over 500 million downloads, is the most popular add-on/extension everand one of the world's most used Ad blocker software.

Why Advertisers are Kicking

Ads Blockers are making Advertisers to lose about $3.45 Billion annually, and that is not good for the industry. Mihir Patkar's Blocking statistics firm, PageFair, estimates that usage grew by 70% between June 2013-June 2014, with 41% of 18-29 year olds using it. In total, there are 144 million active adblock users on the web. That’s roughly 5% of the total Internet population. Dwindling advertising revenue has led many publishers and content provides to fight back by offering their customers the choice of unblocking before they can access full news feed.

This whole crises started 12 Aug, 2016, when news filtered out that Adblock Plus was blocking both posts and ads, and that prompted a swift reaction from Facebook, which immediately announced that it has written a code to unblock Ad Blocker Plus, removing all ads blockers in its News Feed. Just after two days of the Facebook's announcement, Eyeo also released a 'workaround' filter upgrade of its Adblock Plus software which unblocks and then reblock Facebook's unblocker. The tussle between Facebook and Eyeo became a case of who is better at Ads Blocking or Unblocking.

Eyeo's side of the Story

Ad blockers have provided a quick fix by allow customers to take control and filter out bad ads, and that is the crux of the matter, and at the center of this Adblock War are Mark Elliot Zuckerberg's Facebook and Eyeo's founder Wladimir Palant's Adblock Plus. The war is actually between the public and some unscrupulous Ad companies, that places deceptive advertisements on Facebook that leads unsuspecting public to scam websites.

According to Ben Williams of Adblock Plus, Facebook’s action is a “dark path against user choice.” This action and counter-action escalated the Adblock War, and Facebook promptly followed with an counter-announcement that it would regularly release updates of its unblocker to knock Adblock Plus completely out. Now, it looks like Adblock Plus’s workaround is dead, according to Matthew Ingram, in his article in Fortune magazine, titled "Here is Why Facebook is Aways Going to Win the Adblockers War," the social media gaint will always muster its tech team to find a way around Eyeo's Adblock Plus.

The current trend is indicative that consumers are not pleased with publishers and online content merchants, who allow the proliferation of 'Bait Advertising' on social media and news feeds channels, that misleads customers to products or services that are completely different from what the ads display. In other cases, ads are displays with low price, but on visiting the online store, the customers discover that the advertised products are of inferior quality, and often at higher prices.

Technopedia defined 'Bait Advertising' as an unethical advertising technique that involves luring the customer in with a promise of a sale or an inexpensive item they may be interested in, and once their attention is captured, the online advertiser changes the scheme by making the product unavailable and then directing the consumer to like a product that is more expensive.

The Future of Ads Blockers

Matthew Ingram believes that one advantage Facebook has over Eyeo is the fact that Facebook users don have to know when they find a way around Adblockers patches, while for Eyeo's Adblock Plus, users must update these patches each time it creates a filter.

Personally, I do not agree with Ingram that Adblock Plus will or has been completely wiped out, because the Ads blocker War will be just like the Virus War. Just as new anti-viruses are released, so too are new strands viruses introduced, and the battle continues. This war will not end so soon, because this is a war of right of control by users over steady revenue earnings from advertisements by publishers. It is a tough battle and this is just the beginning.

The side of the divide I will pitch tent with depends absolutely on where my interest lies at any particular time. If I become a publisher, sure, I will swing towards unblocking Adblocker, but if I am a victim of bait advertising, like most of us are, Eyeo's Adblock Plus will be my first choice.
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