Dive Brief:
- The Financial Times ran a month-long test on 15,000 registered readers using ad blocking software, as reported by AdAge.
- The publisher's survey found that: 40% of users simply asked to whitelist the site complied; 47% of users provided a reading experience with some words missing to represent ad revenue lost agreed to whitelist the site afterward; and 69% of users told to whitelist the site or leave complied.
- The Financial Times' Global Advertising Sales and Strategy Director Dominic Good ascribed these results to site visitors understanding the value exchange of content for advertising, but didn’t address that the entire group was culled from registered readers who already have a vested interest in the site’s content.
Dive Insight:
Solutions to the challenge ad blockers present remain few, with the only options being to simply up ad quality to a point where users will stop turning the tech on or to offer content and insight that are unavailable elsewhere. The growing use of ad blocking tech affects marketers who can’t reach a desired audience, ad tech firms who can’t deliver ads and publishers who don’t receive any revenue from visitors who are blacking out spots they would otherwise get paid for running.
Some publishers — Business Insider, The Atlantic and Wired included – have recently been pushed to extremes in dealing with ad blocking readers, stonewalling them entirely out of their free sites unless they either sign up for a paid subscription or whitelist.
In the Financial Times' case, the test group only hit 0.75% of its total traffic, while ad blockers represent 20% of its visitors, showing that even the more diplomatic pleas to shut the technology off have a ways to go. Publishers, advertisers and marketers need to work together more and to work more quickly in finding direct, firm solutions, as convincing users to drop ad blockers later down the road will become more difficult as adoption for the software increases.