Dive Brief:
- Ad blocking threatens to hit publishers' revenue streams, and this risk has forced publishers to devise different tactics for countering the growing problem.
- Yahoo, for example, is taking what could be considered a fairly drastic step by denying Yahoo email users access to their accounts if they have active ad-blocking software in place.
- On the complete opposite side of the ad-blocking battles, Gawker Media is allowing those reader that block ads to keep on blocking them.
Dive Insight:
Ad-blocking technology is a challenge for publishers, marketers, agencies and ad tech firms alike, and so far different companies are taking radically different approaches.
Industry insider and Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland wrote in an article for Digiday about the battle, “It could turn into a hideous arms race.”
Yahoo, as mentioned above, is going full scorched earth by not allowing Yahoo email users that employ ad-blocking software access to their accounts. Gawker Media is taking a totally hands-off approach that takes any sort of punishment against visitors to its websites using ad-blocking tech out of the equation. And, it’s still in development, but U.K. publisher The Guardian is looking for a third way that offers its visitors more control over their advertising experience.
“If our consumers are demanding ad block, then we have no choice than to allow that for now,” Gawker Media Head of Programmatic Eyal Ebel said at the Digiday Programmatic Summit. “I don’t see a situation where Gawker Media says to readers, ‘You can’t read our content anymore because you have an ad blocker.’”
Ebel added, “You’re never going to stop it. There are too many people at play, and obviously a publisher the size of Gawker Media doesn’t have the resources to deal with such a systemic issue.”
And, for Yahoo’s approach? You can check out Twitter to see how at least some of its users feel about the policy.
Here’s one of the more printable tweets:
Time to write a plugin that fools Yahoo Mail into thinking you don't have ad/script blockers running. Or just stop using Yahoo Mail.
— ████ ████ (@NotE0157H7) November 20, 2015
