The Rise of Adblockers. What It Means for FranchiseHelp

Native adblockers are coming.

Well technically they’ve been here for a while. But sooner rather than later they’ll be coming to pretty much everyone’s browser by default.

Over the last few weeks there’s been a number of reports, articles, and announcements that have come out detailing how ad blockers are going to be built in by default for most major browsers. As a marketer I’ve got to say that’s pretty damn scary. But it’s also an amazing opportunity.

But let me step back a second and give a bit of context to what news has been coming out the last few weeks that has spurred this thought. (If you already know all this you’ll probably want to skip the next sessions).

Mary Meeker - Internet Trends 2017 

On May 31st Mary Meeker released her annual report of Internet trends. It was full of information on every area of changes in the Internet, from ad spend to ways that offline services are becoming increasingly influenced by online behavior, but it also focused on the rise in ad blocker usage on both mobile and desktop devices.

In the last five years ad blocking has skyrocketed, especially on mobile. To the point where nearly a half billion people worldwide are using mobile adblockers. When you combine that with the fact that digital adspend outpaced TV adspend for the first time ever you’re left in a world that has a whole lot of competition for a shrinking inventory of unblocked users to advertise to.

Google & Apple Agree - No More Ads! (Well not quite)

At almost the exact same time Google and Apple announced at their annual developer conferences that they’re going to enter into the adblocking game themselves. But rather than the traditional third party software users had been using to block ads, they were going to use their browsers (Chrome & Safari respectively) to block ads they didn’t like altogether.

Now, a few things to note. Neither Chrome or Safari are blocking all ads. They’re just blocking ads that they think are bad for the user experience. Google especially is looking at eliminating ads that have traditionally driven folks to adopt ad blockers (so that their own ads don’t wind up getting blocked). So rather than eliminating ads from the Internet they’re just controlling the types of ads that are going to exist.

• No full screen takeovers.
  
• No autoplaying video/audio
  
• No popups
  
• Nothing that blocks a user from leaving a page
  
• No prestitials
  

Terrified or Excited?

As a marketer I’m still not quite sure how I feel about this. On one hand I expect this to force prices to keep rising and rising and rising. Which sucks.

But on the other hand it’s going to force us to be more and more creative about testing new strategies and platforms. And traditionally that’s something that we’ve been pretty good at.

Over the last month we’ve been experimenting more and more with a few new tools and strategies like:

• FB Chat Bots
  
• SMS marketing texts
  
• User specific automated marketing emails
  

I don’t which of these are going to work - if any of them. But as long as the Internet continues to change we’re going to have to keep trying new strategies.