Browsers block ads, threaten free sites, researchers say

Nearly one in four browsers are armed with an ad-blocking tool, reducing revenue at free-content websites, an Irish company said last week.

The popularity of ad blocking—driven by users' frustrations with intrusive, distracting or just-plain-ugly-and-noisy ads—threatens the free-for-all model of the Internet, said PageFair, a company that's helping content publishers audit the problem and try to stem some of the bloodletting.

"It's a vicious cycle," said Neil O'Connor, CEO of Dublin-based PageFair. "Ads are becoming more aggressive to capture eyeballs, but that forces more people to install ad-blocking software. It's a lose-lose situation."

But without ads and the revenue they generate, most content publishers cannot sustain operations. Sans ad revenue, the only options are to charge for access—the path taken by publishers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—or fold the tent. [Note: Computerworld and most IDG news sites rely on advertising for revenue.]

PageFair mined its data from the past 11 months and found some surprising nuggets about ad blocking.

"We started this because we were a publisher ourselves, in the game space," said O'Connor. "We wanted to know how many of our users were dropping out by installing ad blockers, and thought it was maybe as high as 10 percent. But we found that 30 percent were blocking our ads. That was shocking to us."

On average, 22.7 percent of the users who browsed to the several hundred sites monitored by PageFair since September 2012 used an ad blocker, but the range was very wide, from just 1.5 percent to 65 percent.

The more technically savvy a site's audience, the more likely they will block ads, said O'Connor. Game-related websites, for instance, deal with an average ad-blocking rate of 30 percent, the highest of any category. More mainstream websites, however, have a lower percentage of ad-blockers: The average for travel sites is around 5 percent

browsers
"The severity of ad blocking on a given site is positively correlated to the technical ability of its audience," said O'Connor in a report PageFair published recently ( download PDF).

That's because browser ad blocking relies on add-ons, which not all users are comfortable installing, or even know exist. AdBlock Plus, which offers add-ons for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and most recently, Internet Explorer, is the best known.

Firefox users block ads more than those running any other browser, said O'Connor, perhaps because the Mozilla browser has long trumpeted its add-on ecosystem. Also, AdBlock Plus has supported Firefox the longest of any browser.

According to PageFair's data, 37 percent of Firefox users block ads. Google's Chrome took second place with a 30 percent blocking rate. IE's rate was miniscule, under 1 percent.

Corroborating PageFair's numbers is difficult. A May 2012 analysis ( download PDF) by ClarityRay, which like PageFair works with companies to counter ad blocking, pegged the percentage of browsers running blockers at 9.3 percent. But the two companies agreed on many points, including Firefox users' greater interest in ad blockers and technical sites' increased likelihood of being blocked.

Ad blocking is becoming more popular, O'Connor contended. Of the 38 sites for which PageFair has the most data, the annual growth rate was 43 percent, meaning a site that saw 10 percent of its visitors using blocking tools one year could expect that number to climb to 14.3 percent the next.

And appealing to users to not block a site they patronize has proved futile. PageFair offers site owners tools that make such appeals, reminding customers that the site depends on advertising to survive. The efforts have been disappointing.

"It's as if people don't care," said O'Connor. "Even for those who visited a site every day, only 3 percent to 4 percent would turn off ad blocking for that site. And those were smaller sites. For bigger publishers, it's even more difficult."

So what's the answer for sites struggling to deal with ad blocking?

"They have to rethink how they advertise," O'Connor said. "Rather than just chasing the click, they need to really engage customers in the advertising."

One way to prevent even more users from adopting ad blockers, said O'Connor, is to ditch the most intrusive and annoying ads—especially ones that use distracting animations and sounds—and rely on more discrete text-based ads.

The fact is, however, that display ads, which do not restrict themselves to text, are most sites' most effective advertising.

Some companies have taken to working with ad blocker makers—AdBlock Plus in particular—rather than fight the tide. Earlier this year, reports claimed Google had paid AdBlock Plus to get on the latter's "white list" as an acceptable advertiser. AdBlock Plus kicked off an acceptable ads program late in 2011, and does require large advertisers to pay to be on the list.

AdBlock Plus dismissed the claims, saying in a blog-based response that "you cannot 'buy' your way into the stack."

O'Connor said in lieu of a Google-like effort to get on AdBlock Plus' whitelist, he recommended that sites "put in place much more acceptable forms of advertising," those that won't prompt users to turn to ad blockers in the first place.

PageFair is working on a platform that will help site publishers do just that, perhaps with a two-tier system of ads, one acceptable to ad blockers like AdBlock Plus, another more aggressive, then ask users to opt in to one or the other.

"But short term, for some sites, it's already too big a problem," said O'Connor, again citing gaming sites as an example. "For them, they don't have time to wait for online advertising to adapt." 

Bits Blog: Health Sites Under Scrutiny Over Mining of Data

Millions of people rely on Web sites like WebMD and Health.com for information about depression, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer and other sensitive personal health issues. But it can be difficult for consumers to understand how health sites may capture, analyze and share information about user searches and other activities — even the small minority of people who manage to slog all the way through the privacy policies.

Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois.
In an effort to increase industry transparency, Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, has opened an inquiry into the data-mining practices of some popular health sites.

On Tuesday, she sent letters to officials at eight sites asking for detailed information about their companies’ data collection, data storage and data sharing practices. The sites included: about.com; drugs.com; health.com; mayoclinic.com; menshealth.com; mercola.com; WebMd.com; and weightwatchers.com.

In the letters to the sites’ executives, Ms. Madigan said she was concerned about the potential dissemination of information related to people’s private health concerns.

“Health-related information, which would be protected from disclosure when said in a doctor’s office, can be captured, shared, and sold when entered into a Web site,” she wrote. “These concerns are likely overlooked by consumers, as the disclosures about capturing and sharing their information are often buried in privacy policies not found on websites’ main pages.”

WebMD’s privacy policy, for example, says that the site does not make a user’s personal information – like a name or address — available to third parties for marketing purposes.

But third parties, the privacy policy says, may use non-personal data to target WebMD users with ads related to their interests. The policy added that WebMD may combine personal and nonpersonal information about users on the site, or may collate that data with information gathered from external sources.

Risa Fisher, a spokeswoman for WebMD, said that the company had just received Ms. Madigan’s letter of inquiry and planned to provide the information she requested about its user data practices.

“Privacy is very important to WebMD and our policies are designed to fully protect the personal health information of our users,” Ms. Fisher said.

The Illinois inquiry comes after the publication a few days ago of a research letter in a medical journal reporting that some popular health portals leaked information about users’ health searches to third parties, like social networks or ad networks, operating on their Web sites.

For his research, Marco D. Huesch, a health care policy researcher at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at University of Southern California searched for content related to depression, herpes and cancer on 20 popular health-related Web sites.

In the letter about his study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, he said that 13 of those sites used third-party tracking elements like cookies or social media plug-ins. Seven of the sites, he wrote, leaked his health searches to third-party trackers.

Although Mr. Huesch wrote that he could not determine whether the third parties misused the information, he found the leakage of the health searches worrisome in itself.

“The ramifications could span embarrassment, discrimination in the labor market,” Mr. Huesch wrote, “or the deliberate decision by marketers not to offer or advertise particular goods and services to an individual, based solely on the companies’ privately gathered knowledge.”

The online advertising industry is keenly aware of such concerns.

This year, the Network Advertising Initiative, an industry self-regulatory association for third-party digital ad companies, revised its code of conduct to require that its members obtain user permission before collecting information about certain specific health conditions.

The conditions that would require user permission include “all types of cancer, mental health related conditions, and sexually transmitted diseases,” the revised code said, but not acne, high blood pressure, heartburn, cold and flu, or cholesterol management.

The self-regulatory group has nearly 100 members, according to its site. The updated version of code of conduct is scheduled to take effect next year.