The rise of ad blockers

Challenges for advertisements to generate more heat

About a couple of weeks ago, Indian surfers discovered that their favourite news portals had mounted a concerted campaign against ad blockers - the add-ons which prevent advertisements from loading into a browser. Most major Indian news organisations now demand surfers switch off their ad blockers before allowing them to access content. This has caused some consternation. There have also been technical glitches in its implementation. Some technically savvy surfers have discovered workarounds enabling content access while continuing to block. Those who are less savvy have ended up entirely disabling blockers (rather than disabling it on specific sites), and rapidly hit data limits. But glitches aside, this issue will continue to cause serious debate. It is not easy to resolve. There are pros and cons to the use of ad blockers, and both sides can make their case with logical arguments.

The ad blocker is part of the standard armoury of any experienced surfer. A recent survey indicated that roughly 122 million Indians use ad blockers, including mobile ad blockers. That is close to half the Indian internet fraternity. The logic for using a blocker is simple. Advertisements consume data, quite apart from often being irritating. Pages load faster without advertisements. Most Indian surfers are on mobile, using expensive data plans with low limits, on slow connections. While India's voice tariffs are hyped as being the lowest in the world, data tariffs are not inexpensive. Importantly, ad blockers also prevent many types of trackers and cookies from loading, thus helping to maintain privacy and security.

The arguments against ad blockers are also compelling. By analogy to print, and television, web advertisements allow the content provider to offer free, or highly subsidised content. Free websites depend on advertisements for sustenance. Given the standard revenue models, the website suffers a revenue loss if advertisements are blocked. A fair argument can also be made for tracking users. Tracking enables advertisers and websites to target users better. Any website and every advertiser would like to know how many visitors are repeats, how long visitors spent, where they came from, what they saw, and so on. Globally speaking, most media sites use third-party tracking methods extensively and Indian media is no exception.

Unfortunately Indian sites are also often guilty of certain practices, which could politely be described as solecisms in a price-sensitive environment. Many media sites overload with very data-heavy advertisements, including auto-play videos: No surfer wants to download say, 15 megabytes of advertisements to access content that is in itself, one megabyte in size. This is not an uncommon scenario. Also, very few Indian media sites even bother to intimate surfers that there is a tracking policy. It is too early to say if there will be a perceptible drop in visitors to Indian media sites that demand ad blockers are disabled. The response of surfers will be driven by many factors, including the speed of connection, data-plan costs, quality of news content and quality of advertisement content as well.

Debates around ad blockers continue to play out in other regions. Going by the global experience, there will probably be give and take on both sides in India. Media sites will have to optimise advertisements for minimised data consumption, and also disable auto-play for video. They should, ideally, declare tracking policies and perhaps, offer advertisement-free subscriptions as an alternative, as some Western media sites do. On their part, surfers will have to come to terms with some advertising being pushed at them. Although a new balance will certainly be found, quite a lot of heat will be generated as the market evolves.