Dive Brief:
- The Washington Post has introduced a new high-speed ad product in an effort to battle poor user experience. With the new ad tech ad unit, Fuse, the publisher hopes to dissuade its audience from using ad blockers.
- According to the Wall Street Journal, the ads are designed to instantly render on mobile devices or desktops when users click on them.
- Fuse ads are pre-cached and hosted by the Washington Post so they are part of the page users have already loaded into whatever device they are using to access the publisher's content.
Dive Insight:
The rise of ad blocking tech has been spurred in part by bad user experience, and if you zoom out, the issue has hit publishers more directly than other players in the digital advertising space. The move by the Washington Post is both interesting and potentially game changing for publishers looking for fresh ways to attract audiences fed up by poor ads experiences.
To date, most content creators have to give their output to Facebook Instant Articles or use Google’s open-sourced Accelerated Mobile Pages API to have both their content and ads served optimized for mobile users. The Washington Post is taking both ad networks, as well as ad tech firms, out of that equation by hosting the ads themselves. For all visitors, not just mobile visitors, the ads will be a seamless part of visiting the page and will also circumvent ad blocking software.
Jarrod Dicker, the Washington Posts’ head of ad product and engineering, told the Journal, “Nobody has thought about how to solve these issues for advertisers. We’re saying, ‘Don’t treat them like second-class citizens.’”
At the same, the Washington Post remains an enthusiastic adopter of Facebook Instant Articles.