(Chinese Version)

On October 14th, 1994, the famous American magazine Wired launched its online version Hotwired, which exhibited online advertisements from 14 clients, including AT&T. It is believed to be a milestone of the history of advertising and also the first attempt to advertise online. Since then, ad agencies have been plunging into the online platform. All of a sudden, everybody, including advertisers, ad agencies, Internet developers and service providers seemed to realize that online advertisements were the future of ad industry.

It’s been two decades since the first online advertisement appeared. In the last five years, with the surging of mobile Internet, online advertisement has surpassed traditional advertisement forms in both the US and China. However, the uncurbed development of online advertisement has brought many unnoticeable problems. Compared with traditional media such as radio, newspapers and television, the Internet contains massive information and provides people with an open environment. Taking the spirit of freedom in the visionary world, Internet users have learned to use the Internet to change the world.

In 2002, a guy named Henrik Aasted Sorensen developed a plug-in unit for Phoenix, a web browser at that time. The unit could filter out advertising photos and was named Adblock 0.1. Now, Phoenix is known as Firefox while Adblock and Adblock plus are becoming the nightmare of online advertisements.

The uncurbed growth of online advertisements

In the early phase of the Internet, anything online is new for people, including advertisements. When the Internet was dominated by texts, an advertisement can be a real attention-grabber. Advertising agencies were well aware of the potentiality of online advertisements and put millions of advertisement on the Internet. During the peak time of online advertisements, it was fair to say that the content of an online advertisement was not important at all. As long as an advertiser put it in a proper place, consumers and orders would follow up. In this case, advertisement has become an important tool in the new Internet-based business. 

Motivated by the large profits generated by advertisements, some advertisers have gone out of the line and put lots of pop ads on websites, which is quite an annoyance. It well explains why Internet users are in desperate need of Adblock plug-ins later on.

Pop ads expand like virus and can affect users’ experience. Worse still, many pop ads contain trojan virus, malicious programs and obscene information. As a result, when talking about online advertisements today, people tend to relate it with pop ads and vulgar content. Last year marked the 20th anniversary of online advertisement. Ethan Zuckerman, a programmer who developed the first pop ad, apologized to the public that “I didn’t intend to do so. Sorry. ”

Pop ads are not the only problem. Despite its fast developing trajectory, the quality of online advertisement cannot keep up the pace. Its content is no match for that of TV advertisement and its form has no obvious change during the years.

When it comes to advertisement teaching-cases, most examples come from TV advertisements, which surpass online advertisements in terms of idea, emotion and rhythm. However, TV can limit the spread of advertisement while this problem does not exist in the Internet world, where multi-faceted media forms exist to make sure that the latest advertisement can reach the targeted audiences. However, the content of online advertisement seems to be directly transplanted from their counterparts on newspapers and television. That being said, advertisers are still spending lots of money on online advertisement. The location and communication effect of online advertisements are given so much weight that their content is often ignored.

While Internet users have learned to distinguish between good advertisements and bad ones, advertisers, unfortunately, didn’t make much progress. They extensively crammed advertisements into websites without analyzing targeted audiences. Besides, they didn’t pay much attention to understanding what consumers really need. Thus, the development of online advertisements didn’t quite live up to people’s expectation.

Taking the spirit of openness and freedom in the cyberspace, online advertisements are expanding crazily without any regulation and blueprint. It is being used as a money tree by both advertisers and websites.

Anyway, we still have to give some credits for online advertisements for their innovation, though quite rare. Google developed AdWords and AdSense in 2000 and 2003 in order to form an advertisement platform. Through such platforms, advertisers can find the right websites to put on their advertisements.

Although Google might not be the founder of such platform (Amazon developed a similar platform earlier than Google did), but AdSense is definitely the most successful one, since for a long time, Google’s revenue mainly came from AdWords and AdSense. Besides commercial websites, there are many small websites and even personal websites out there. The advent of AdSense has given those websites opportunities to make money.

However, this is only one side of the story. In the following story, Google actually plays a mixed role.

Adblock is indeed a good business

After the long story about the history of online advertisements, let’s talk about Adblock.  According to Google’s statistics, in 2014 the search times of “Adblock” surpassed that of “advertisement” for the first time.

In 2010, Mozilla announced that Adblock Plus became the first Firefox plug-in that had been downloaded for more than 100 million times. According to a survey in 2013, there were more than 10,000,000 active users of Adblock Plus on Google browser and more than 40,000,000 users all over the world. Its downloaded times exceeded 200,000,000 in that year. Moreover, Adblock has covered quite a few platforms, including IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Android mobile platform by that year.

If you have no idea what are these numbers all about, take a look at this. A survey from PageFair in 2013 shows that around 22% Internet users choose to block online advertisements and the number of such group grows at 43% per year. In 2014, there were 144 million Internet users putting various ad shields into their browsers. Surprised as you may, these numbers could shatter the confidence of many advertisers.

Life is getting hard for advertisers. Although the market value of online advertisement reached 120 billion dollars in 2014, the number of people who choose to use Adblock has grown from 40 million to nearly 200 million since 2013. The declining return of investment is giving advertisers a real hard time. In 1994, 44 online users out of 100 would click on the banner in a website. However, only 4 out of 10000 people will do so today.

Are advertisements and ad shields mutually exclusive? Not necessarily true. There are reports in recent years showing that Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other tycoons choose to pay Adblock Plus so that their advertisements won’t be blocked by Adblock Plus. Since 2013, Google has been losing 600 million to 800 million dollars in ad revenue. If such reports are true, then Adblock Plus has indeed “coaxed” a huge amount of money out of those giants.

Adblock Plus told the public that since 2011 it has put forward a plan called “Acceptable Ads”, which means that Adblock Plus will not ban all the online advertisements. Such plan will definitely bring controversy into Adblock Plus. But they explained that the fees charged from Google and Microsoft will be used to pay for their employees.

It is said that Adblock Plus once wanted to have a “conversation” with Twitter to discuss about the advertisement thing. However, such request was ignored by Twitter. The Guardian put an interesting title above this report “First it blocks your ads, and then asks for money to unblock them”. Guardian might not be fair to say so, since its online advertisements were blocked by Adblock Plus as well.

If Adblock only bans some advertisements, then what kinds of advertisement are acceptable? Adblock Plus explained that they only accepted static advertisement (without animation, voice and distracting pictures) that didn’t affect users’ reading experience. They also made some rules about where to put those advertisements. Since the new rule came into practice, Adblock has received 777 applications to unblock their advertisements but only 9.5% of them succeeded.

It is obvious that as more people are using ad shields such as Adblock Plus, those ad shields are acting as the guardian of the Internet. They hold advertisements as hostages and for advertisers, they have to either pay for “protection fee” or suffer from revenue loss. Under such circumstance, many advertisers choose to “buy” their advertising spots on websites. Our metaphor might not be appropriate, since Adblock Plus in essence is user-friendly, and we have no actual evidence to prove that Adblock Plus is charging advertisers with such fee. It is mere speculation from some advertisers and media agencies. Indeed, Adblock Plus is in a favorable position in the whole game.

The ambition of Adblock Plus

Adblock Plus wants more than a guardian. It strives to be a rule-maker. It wants to make its own rule for online advertisements and block those who don’t obey the rule. As is known to all, few organizations can make a rule in the open and free Internet world, even for a monopoly in a certain area. Because making a rule violates the spirit of Internet: freedom and openness. Once a rule is established, it will inevitably restrict Internet users in one way or another.

Not all people support Adblock Plus. However, even the law is standing on its side. Recently, two German newspapers, Die Zeit and Handelsblatt, have asked the court to ban Adblock Plus. They claimed that Adblock Plus had violated their advertisement-based business mode. But the judges in Hamburg believed that Adblock Plus didn’t break the law at all. Users should be allowed to use Adblock Plus to keep away from those annoying advertisements and protect their privacy.

It was not the first time that Adblock Plus had won such lawsuit. Adblock Plus claims that it could protect users’ privacy and ensure their safety online, which seems quite convincing for judges.

Actually, our online activities and search history are tracked by many companies by looking at our cookies. The Easy Privacy List function in Adblock Plus can prevent websites from doing so. In this way, users’ search history cannot be traced and their privacy is thus protected. In fact, most footprints are used by advertisers for ad analysis as to pin down the targeted audiences. In this sense, using Adblock plus can do no harm to Internet users.

As more people surf the Internet through mobile terminals, Adblock Plus is reaching its hands towards mobile platforms as well. In fact, Adblock Plus has been in Android’s platform for quite a long time, which really pissed Google off, since it allows Adblock Plus to stay in Google App store and even recommended Adblock Plus to users.

This time, Google kicked Adblock Plus’s Android version out of its Play Store, because advertisement revenues now comes mainly from mobile terminals. Facebook announced that 73% of its sales revenue comes from mobile platforms in the last quarter. If Google still takes no action about Adblock Plus, it will definitely suffer from more loss. 

Well, that’s not the whole story. Last month, Adblock Plus had developed its own mobile browser and had penetrated into IOS and Android platforms, which puts Adblock and Plus into a competitive relationship in the mobile markets. Now Adblock Plus is a big threat to Google, since dominating mobile browsers matters more than just being a small plug-in in PC browsers. Now, Adblock Plus is getting down to a serious business.

It has been noticed that Adblock Plus is launching a big campaign in Chinese universities. It believes that Adblock Plus is a great tool for educational institutions for it is completely free. Besides, it can also ensure online safety, save inflows and increase user efficiency.

Such plan can be described as huge and ambitious. Once universities adopt Adblock Plus, there will be a surge in the number of users. Anyway, students are frequent Internet users, so they will definitely benefit from the protection of Adblock Plus. The campaign towards Chinese universities is meaningful for Adblock Plus, for it will generate more users in a short period of time.

Digital trade war or Advertisement 2.0

In the latest issue, The Economist shared its opinion on the controversy about Adblock Plus. It believes that “the block of mobile advertisement has violated the principle of neutrality. The surge of ad shields is breaking the basis business model of the Internet and is likely to cause a digital trade war in the globe”. However, Adblock Plus believes that advertisers should put user experience above profits and make their advertisements less annoying.

Native advertisements were born a few years ago but didn’t receive much attention. Now, the new online media such as Buzzfeed are trying to utilize native advertisements and break the block of traditional online ads. Native ad can “stand out” in an ad-free webpage and once properly used, it can avoid the block from Adblock Plus.

Native advertisements represent the beginning of traditional online advertisement reform. Maybe it is high time for online advertisement to make some change and adapt to the ever competitive business environment.

The life is getting harder for advertisers and their future is unpredictable. Now it’s the time to make a change.

[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Shao Luwen, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Jackie Jia (Senior translator at Echo), working for TMTpost.