Copyright CNN
Randall Rothenburg was the keynote speaker at this year’s IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) leadership meeting, and had some choice words to say about ad-blocking software. We’ve already seen some shots fired at companies like AdBlock-Plus when their attendance was revoked after purchasing a ticket to this event.
I had the pleasure of reading the keynote speech linked above. And I just have to give a rebuttal to just about every word out of this fellow’s mouth regarding Ad-Blocking software. Strap yourselves in, because the ride doesn’t stop with this roller-coaster. All opinions below belong to me, not Chi Corporation.
Below is the excerpt from where the ad blocker rant begins:
Freedom of speech, diversity of thought, access to the means of universal communication, the opportunity to speak truth to power – these are the way societies grow. They are the underpinnings of economic competition, for reaching people with and attracting them to new commercial ideas is the stimulus to all innovation. In turn, that competition – competition among economic actors, and competition in the marketplace of ideas – assures that neither a single dominant economic power nor the state itself can control all the levers of society.
Starts out pretty good. I can agree our First Amendment Rights are essential for a functioning society, and that competition in a free market is the constant driving force behind innovation and the betterment of all members of said society.
In all advanced societies around the world, advertising has been a central contributor to assuring such freedom and diversity of expression and economic action.
This fact has been well documented in every major history of media in the United States. As Princeton Professor Paul Starr wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “The Creation of the Media,” “American journalism became more of an independent and innovative source of information just as it became more of a means of advertising and publicity.”
Advertising has been a contributing factor in the most rudimentary of senses (putting literature in front of eyeballs to promote a message,) but there’s a big difference between organizations such as the IAB distributing literature for the purpose of peddling wares and the literature of someone like Thomas Paine, or the work of investigative journalists that bring some sunshine to otherwise hidden or deceitful practices.
It is for this very reason – the virtuous circle that links freedom to advertise to freedom of the press to freedom of expression to economic freedom – that Article 19, the influential NGO, says: “The right to freedom of expression covers any kind of information or ideas, not only contributions to political, cultural or artistic debate but also mundane and commercially motivated expressions.”
And this is why I hate the ad-block profiteers.
OK now he has officially lost me. Comparing the “freedom to peddle” to freedom of expression is a fairly blatant use of the false equivalence fallacy. Nobody is restricting the IAB’s right to advertise. The People are blocking their content by choice. If these “ad-block profiteers,” as he calls them, were government sponsored then his words would hold weight. But they are not. They are simply providing the IAB’s business model with the competition among economic actors that Rothenberg praised so much in an earlier paragraph.
Now, you may be aware of a kerfuffle that began about 10 days ago, when an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes at a for-profit German company called AdBlock-Plus took to the digisphere to complain over and over that IAB had “disinvited” them to this convention. That, of course, is as much a lie as the others they routinely try to tell the world. We had never invited them in the first place. They registered for this event online. When we found out, we cancelled the registration and reversed their credit card billing. Why? For the simple reason that they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less – and less diverse – information.
They’re not stealing from anyone. I’m not sure Rothenberg understands what constitutes theft. For theft to occur, you first have to own some property whether it be intellectual or physical. For someone to steal it, they have to either acquire or re-distribute the content (if the property is an IP,) without permission or payment, or remove physical property from a premises without a transaction occurring. “Subverting freedom of the press” is a huge stretch of the imagination, and frankly I’m not sure what kind of mental gymnastics Rothenberg had to perform to arrive at this conclusion. The same goes with his accusation that blocking ads is a business model predicated on censorship of content. Again, nobody is restricting your right to display your content on websites. For real, actual censorship to be occurring, the blocking has to be enforced by a central authority without consent from the viewer or producer of the content. Consumers are simply telling you they’re not interested in your content and don’t want to waste their bandwidth displaying it. Ad blocking software is just a more efficient vehicle than anything else consumers have at the moment. What ad-blocking software is doing is the digital equivalent of hanging up on a telemarketer, or telling a street advertiser that you don’t want their flyers and pamphlets.
AdBlock-Plus claims it wants to engage in dialogue. But its form of dialogue is an incessant monologue. Don’t take my word for it. During Advertising Week in New York last fall, the company convened a dinner it fatuously billed as “Camp David,” “a round table discussion…to hear from publishers and others about what we can do to improve advertising and the Internet for all.”
Scores of publishing executives were invited. Two showed up. They could get none of their questions answered about how the company intends to administer its so-called “Acceptable Ads” program, who would serve on that program’s allegedly independent board, what powers that board would have, or how its payment plans would work. Each used the same word to describe the AdBlock-Plus executives: “disingenuous.”
Perhaps most notably, neither of these publishers has received a single follow-up call in the four months since “Camp David” took place. So much for dialogue.
I can neither confirm nor deny this sequence of events, nor validate the claim of the two unnamed publishing executives that are calling ABP executives disingenuous.
Of course, none of this surprises me. This is what happens when your only motivation, your only metric, is money. For that is what AdBlock-Plus is: an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism.
Ahahahaha, haha, ha. Hold on a sec. Hahahahaha! The IAB. Criticizing people. For wanting to make money. Hahahahahaha! Let me quote something Mr. Rothenberg said earlier in this exact same speech.
And finally, I’d like to ask all the men and women who have served on the Board of the IAB during our first 20 years to stand, and accept the acknowledgement of your grateful peers.
Thank you for building our industry. Thank you for the first $50 billion.
Of course, we are not here, you are not here, to celebrate the past. You are here to create the future – to find your way to The Next $50 billion. And we have some of the digital world’s most provocative thinkers and doers on this stage through tomorrow afternoon to help you reconnoiter this path.
Fifty billion dollars. And he follows it up with “How can we make 50 billion more?!” And he has the audacity to call Ad blocking an “extortion racket.” Nevermind that online advertising, by the IAB’s own admission, excessively drains device battery life (quite literally taking consumer’s money in the form of power consumption,) consumes excessive bandwidth (again, taking consumer’s money in the form of data overages if they have a bandwidth cap from their ISP,) and whose advertising networks serve as a vehicle for malware delivery (Scareware, cryptolocker, cryptowall and other malicious software that tries to extort cash from their victims.) For these reasons I find it hilarious that Rothenberg can make the claim that the developers/executives of Ad-blocking software are greedy with a straight face.
I’m far from the first person to notice this. Writing up an interview with AdBlock-Plus’s leaders more than two years ago in Salon, Andrew Leonard said: “It still sounds to me like something that bears more than a passing resemblance to a protection racket. Pay up, or we’ll break your windows! Pay up, or millions of Adblock Plus users will never see any of your ads.”
Taiwanese reporter and blogger Sascha Pallenberg said similarly, calling AdBlock-Plus “a mafia-like advertising network.”
I can’t say I agree with Ad-Block Plus’s business model of accepting money for whitelisted-by-default advertising companies (I prefer uBlock Origin’s FOSS model,) but I would hardly call it mafia-like. They make advertisers that apply for white-list privileges adhere to an acceptable ads policy. They still give users of the software the choice of blocking even these whitelisted companies. If it were mafia-like, these whitelists would not be able to be modified or bypassed. ABP users can also whitelist ads that are on the block-list. Ultimately it’s about consumer choice, and the consumers by and large have chosen to block the majority of ads.
The bad news is, AdBlock-Plus is not alone. For-profit ad-blockers have been one of the more recent darlings of the venture capital industry and angel investors – including firms with investments in advertising technology and ad-supported publishing companies.
Shine, an Israeli startup trying to sell ad-blocking software to mobile phone networks, is backed prominently by Horizons Ventures, the VC arm of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, and run by his girlfriend. His other investments include Spotify and Facebook.
If there are that many backers and investors, then obviously there is a market for it. This is the competition. It is up to the IAB to react to it. I have an idea. Why doesn’t the IAB reach out to Shine to see if they want to hire you guys to advertise for them?
The latest ad-blocking company is a Web browser startup called “Brave.” It was launched by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, whose last major investment was in banning gay marriage in California. His business model not only strips advertisements from publishers’ pages – it replaces them with his own for-profit ads.
This translates to “I don’t like competition! It loses me money!” Users are allowed to download and use whatever browsers they want to. If companies like the IAB, who have used such underhanded tactics as bundling search toolbars with otherwise free software that hijack user searches, funnel them to your advertising networks (CNET.com, I’m looking at you since you’re a IAB affiliate,) and inject ads from the IAB network into the user’s browser, they have ZERO credibility when criticizing someone else for doing the same thing.
THIS is the true face of ad blocking. It is the rich and self-righteous, who want to tell everyone else what they can and cannot read and watch and hear – self-proclaimed libertarians whose liberty involves denying freedom to everyone else.
Again, nobody is denying you the RIGHT to advertise. If anyone is trying to tell people what they can and cannot do, it is the IAB. “You can’t block ads! You have to watch our content!”
The ad-block profiteers are building for-profit companies whose business models are premised on impeding the movement of commercial, political, and public-service communication between and among producers and consumers. They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.
The toll gates are still under the control of the users. Even if companies pay to be on the white-list, the user can still block the content. This is how ad blockers should, and do, function.
They may attempt to dignify their practices with such politically correct phrases as “reasonable advertising,” “responsible advertising,” and “acceptable ads”; and they can claim as loudly as they want that they seek “constructive rapport” with other stakeholders. But in fact, they are engaged in the techniques of The Big Lie, declaring themselves the friends of those whose livelihoods they would destroy, and allies to those whose freedoms they would subvert.
This is quite clearly an appeal to emotion rather than logic. I implore any readers of this blog-post to read about Ad-Block Plus’ Acceptable Ad Policy and make up their own minds before buying any of this speech. Especially the bit about “The Big Lie.”
There certainly are intelligent, well-meaning critics of advertising, marketing, and media with whom we engage, whose aim is to advance consumers’ interests through dialogue and development. The ad-block profiteers are not among them. They cloak themselves in a Halloween mask of consumerism as they attempt to impose private taxes on consumers and businesses alike. Their technologies indiscriminately obstruct competitive pricing data, information about product features, vital political opinions, site content, user options, public interest communications, and other intelligence necessary for the functioning of democratic capitalist societies.
Two responses here:
– If your aim is to engage consumer interest through dialogue and development, why did the IAB deny ABP from the conference? Isn’t that effectively “censoring their voice” given the loose definition of censorship used in this speech thus far? By denying them the ability to have dialogue at the IAB conference, can Rothenberg really claim that he supports a democratic process?
– The technologies don’t indiscriminately obstruct this information. The block lists are fully customize-able and the power firmly in the hands of the user. I use ad-blockers regularly in my day to day browsing habits and I can find all sorts of competitive pricing data, product features, political opinions, etc. I just miss out on loud flashy video files and auto-playing audio content that I would quickly try to stop anyway.
Surveys repeatedly show that upwards of 75% of consumers prefer ad-supported Internet sites where the content is free over ad-free sites where they would pay fees for content. Fewer than 10% of consumers want to pay for content. By driving digital publishers, including some of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, to impose fees on consumers in order to continue to support their business and content-development objectives, the ad-block profiteers are subverting the will of consumers.
What surveys? Who conducted them? Where were these surveys taken? Who participated? Etc. There’s a big difference between a neutral 3rd party conducting a survey and a sponsored survey that is intended to produce desired results. Companies do this all the time to promote their brand.
So where is the good news in all of this?
People are still blocking intrusive ads and saving themselves some bandwidth and malware headaches. Next.
Well, in their race to the bottom and frenzy for investment, the ad-block profiteers seem more intent on killing each other than on killing advertising – which, of course, they require in order to feed their business models.
Good! Competition! The more competition among ad blockers, the less intrusive ads I have to see! If someone comes out with a better product than Ad-Block Plus then the consumer wins!
Many of their business models are undoubtedly illegal. Already, Shine’s model of ISP-level ad-blocking has been cited by regulators as a probable violation of net neutrality principles.
Undoubtedly illegal is a pretty hefty phrase to throw around here. What federal or state codes make the practice of blocking online advertisements illegal? Are there any court cases to cite?
To the best of my knowledge the FCC’s “big three” rules for Net Neutrality are:
Bright Line Rules: The first three rules ban practices that are known to harm the Open Internet:
* No Blocking: broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
* No Throttling: broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
* No Paid Prioritization: broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind—in other words, no “fast lanes.” This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates.
I’d say that the claim that blocking ads at the ISP level being illegal hinges on the phrase “non-harmful devices.” Since ad networks have been proven to deliver malware, can they really be considered “non-harmful devices?” It’s questionable, and for a court to determine.
More and more publishers are initiating what IAB calls “detection-notice-choice-and constraint” regimes. They are installing scripts that enable them to see when consumers coming to their sites have ad-blockers installed; they are providing notice to consumers about that and about publishers’ business models, which largely require advertising to support otherwise free content. They are offering consumers choices – to turn off their ad-blockers, to pay a subscription fee, or another alternative. And absent one of those choices, the publishers are constraining consumers’ access to content, reinforcing the immense value of what they deliver.
And it’s working – IAB publishers implementing DNCC are seeing high percentages of consumers making mutually beneficial choices to maintain their access to desired content.
This is a good start. Consumers should have the choice of what content their browser displays. If the consumer and the content provider can’t come to an agreement through the DNCC, the consumer is free to find content elsewhere.
But the best news of all is that the ad-block profiteers have done this industry a favor. They have forced us to look inward – at our own relentless self-involvement – and outward, to the men, women, and children who are our actual customers.
IAB Senior Vice President and Tech Lab General Manager Scott Cunningham put it best and most succinctly in an October IABlog post: “We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.”
IAB research conducted in 2014 found that one-third of U.S. Web users – and 41 percent of millennials – had installed ad-blocking software on one device or another. The no. 1 reason consumers used ad blockers was the fear that advertising could infect their computers or smartphones with viruses. But more than two-thirds of ad-blocking consumers also said they believed advertising slowed their access to the Internet.
“The worst ads load so slowly that they use up data plans and sap battery life,” The New York Times reported recently.
And that’s why people block ads. The ad industry screwed up, and did so in a manner so bad and noticeable that a huge chunk of internet users want to block their content. I’m just amazed it took them this long to realize how big of a problem they are. The IAB is reaping what they have sown over the past 15 years. Does anyone remember the days of pop-up advertising? Or when animated .gif files encouraged people to apply for adjustable rate mortgages in 2006-2007?
Why did we lose track of user experience? For much of the past decade, the digital ad industry, aided and abetted by venture capitalists with no long-term stake in the viability of media and marketing businesses, have been in a headlong rush to subvert industry standards, hoping they can own the single business model that can lock in proprietary advantage and lock out competitors in the $600 billion global ad industry.
So basically, greed. The IAB fell prey to the very thing to which they are criticizing the “for profit ad-block industry.”
The result has been breathtaking innovation – but also suffocating chaos. Multitudes of could-be formats and wannabe standards crowd screens, interrupt consumers’ activities while impeding the delivery of desired content, create supply chain vulnerabilities, generate privacy concerns, and drive fears about data security.
This is the IAB’s admission that they did not adhere to an acceptable ad policy. Like the one that Ad-Block Plus is trying to enforce. Both sides of Rothenberg’s mouth are spouting different things now. Earlier he said “They offer to lift their toll gates for those wealthy enough to pay them off, or who submit to their demands that they constrict their freedom of speech to fit the shackles of their revenue schemes.” Yet here he basically says “We need to change our business model to not do all the bad stuff that Ad Block Plus points out that we’re doing.” I hear that Cognitive Dissonance is pretty sour.
Ad-blocking has been a consumer plebiscite; as former Mozilla executive Darren Herman noted at the IAB Ad Operations Summit a few months back, the software offered consumers a vote – and they have voted no on chaos, opacity, and slowness.
So, earlier Rothenberg said ad blocking is censorship. Now he’s saying it’s a vote of the people against bad practices and policies exhibited by the IAB. This speech reads like the following:
Copyright Disney
You can’t have it both ways. Something can’t be censorship if it’s decentralized and in control of the viewer. So it looks like he’s finally getting to the meat-and-potatoes of what the real problem is.
Fortunately, there is a real way out of this conundrum. It requires this industry to embrace the founding rationale for the IAB, articulated 20 years ago by our forefathers and foremothers. We must create new operating standards – consumer-friendly rules of the road that regulate how we will operate our sites, our advertising, and our delivery. And we must develop technical standards that will realize these guidelines effectively and efficiently.
This will not be easy. Unlike every other major medium, the Internet is a collectively owned and managed enterprise. Whereas a broadcast television network controls and maintains rigorous standards for everything a consumer sees on its channel, an Internet page is a cobbled-together assembly of parts, managed by perhaps dozens of independent businesses, each contracted individually by the publisher, agencies, and marketers. Some of these entities supervise the content you see; some administer and analyze the invisible data that governs, measures, and optimizes how and to whom the content is delivered.
This decentralized cauldron of innovation requires a new set of guiding principles. That is why the IAB and the IAB Tech Lab developed the LEAN Principles.
He then goes on to talk about the LEAN principles in more detail. The irony is that these LEAN principles align fairly closely with what AdBlock-Plus suggests for their acceptable advertising policies. I don’t disagree with the above statement from Rothenberg entirely as I feel that the IAB needs to get its act together if it wants its content in front of eyeballs. Where my biggest point of contention lies is in all the saber rattling about ad blocking, where Rothenberg accuses for-profit companies for some of the exact things that the IAB has done over the years. Ultimately the freedom to block advertisements should lie in the hands of the users. And that’s where it currently stands, for better or worse. It will be interesting to see if these LEAN principles actually make a difference, or if the online advertising industry will get even more devious with their tactics. Only time will tell.
