Millions of websites depend on advertising to maintain their operations, so it seems logical to believe that the use of adblocking technology will ultimately harm their viability by preventing adverts from being seen.
Alas, it’s a heuristic that new research from Carnegie Mellon suggests might not be true. The research found that ad blockers can actually benefit users, companies, and indeed the market itself.
“While most speculations point to a grim outlook for advertisers and platforms as a result of ad blockers, the results of our study offer a glimmer of hope by arguing that ad blockers could actually benefit companies,” the researchers explain.
Affecting the market
The researchers developed an analytical model to assess the impact ad blockers had on competition in the ad market, the rates of advertising, and even the sensitivity of users to online advertising. This assessment revealed two main type of user: those who are more sensitive to ads and who tend to use ad blockers, and another who are not, and therefore do not use ad blockers.
Based upon this, the researchers identified three options available to websites in response to the availability of ad blockers:
- Ban ad blocking by disabling access to the website for users deploying ad blockers.
- Allow ad blocking and continue displaying ads, even though some users won’t see them.
- Allow ad blocking, but charge users who don’t wish to see ads a subscription fee.
They also identified four ways in which the use of ad blockers can help the market:
- They can actively filter out users who are most sensitive to ads in general, thus allowing websites to target ads at those most accepting of them.
- They allow users to remove ads that frustrate their user experience.
- They help to regulate the ad industry by encouraging advertising platforms to pay ad-blocking companies to ensure their ads are allowed past the blocker.
- This more efficient market can in turn help to improve the quality of content hosted on websites.
“Our study has implications for platforms dependent on ad revenue, providing general guidelines regarding how they should proceed with decisions about advertising,” the researchers say. “For example, if a website has users who are generally sensitive to ads, then its platform cannot expect to receive a lot of ad revenue, even when it prevents the use of ad blockers. By allowing ad blockers, both the platform and the users can benefit.”
