"Here are 3 simple rules if you don't want me to block your ads:
1- Serve them from the same server you're serving your content from, in the same session. No 3rd parties, period. Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but life is inconvenient. Deal with it.
2- Make sure ads weigh 10% or less of the total page size. If the page is 500 KB, the ads should be 50 KB or less. This is perfectly doable.
3- Make sure they're completely static. No video, no sounds, no javascript. HTML links are obviously fine.
I think these are very reasonable criteria, don't you agree?"
https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4n3sny/according_to_ceo_thompson_of_the_new_york_times/d41aeiv?context=3
I saw that post too, and no I don't think that they are reasonable - and I also don't think that the OP meant it.
Criteria like this are only realistic to the largest of publishers (ok, I know that the post was about NYT, but the comment was more general). In typical reddit fashion the assumption is that all ads are served by mega-corps and are managed in some weird, last century bubble. Direct serving of ads only works if you have a small number of advertisers buying a large amount of advertising - ie you are a huge publisher doing direct deals at a premium. That's great if you are: Your sales team spend months on the deal, your dev team produce the creatives, your adops team traffic them and your account managers keep everyone happy enough to pay $30 CPM.
However, that isn't typical of ad serving. The internet isn't the newspaper stand dominated by a few big publishers. There are millions of small publishers trying to do their best with small buys at low CPMs. The typical buy is a few hundred impression at under $1 CPM. The time it takes to raise an invoice costs enough to make the deal unprofitable. That's why networks and exchanges exist and we don't currently have another model to support and independent web. Either we fix RTB of we're all logging on to the Murdock / Fox internet.
The online ad eco system is out of hand. Want to know how out of hand? check out the
ad-tech lumascape. Clearly that isn't right.
My response then:
1- Serve them from the same server you're serving your content from, in the same session. No 3rd parties, period. Yeah, I know it's inconvenient, but life is inconvenient. Deal with it.Not inconvenient. Simply not at all viable for most of the internet.
2- Make sure ads weigh 10% or less of the total page size. If the page is 500 KB, the ads should be 50 KB or less. This is perfectly doable.Ad requests begin before the page is loaded in order to reduce load times. To base the maximum creative size on the page size would mean until the size of every asset is known before making the ad request. That would be incredibly painful and the opposite of a good user experience.
3- Make sure they're completely static. No video, no sounds, no javascript. HTML links are obviously fine.Most ads are HTML or Image, but javascript is used to serve them. Ad blockers block them anyway.
Why I think the reddit OP didn't mean itAd blockers are like a scorched earth policy. Everything gets blocked, good or bad. If people blocked ads on annoying sites that would be great - more money for the sites doing it well and everyone gets encouraged to do a better job. That isn't what happens though. They try to block everything, which means that the only sites that do well are those that serve the worst ads to the rest of their users or get sneaky with their ad delivery.
Ad blockers are making advertising worse. They are hurting those that play nicely the most and encouraging more aggressive advertising. 2 years ago very few publishers that I worked with wanted to use interstitials, video ads, take-overs etc. Now I am asked about them every week by a publishers who needs ways to offset the revenue lost to ad blocking.
I think that there was a huge opportunity lost with ad blocking. If ABP in particular had started out from the position of trying to block bad ads not all ads we would have a tool that was pushing publishers to do better rather than worse. Worse still, I think that a more "reasonable" blocker that allowed people to block particular types of ads (flash, HTML5, large formats, video, more than X per page etc) wouldn't work today. The likely end game is less independent content and a further move away from web to apps (which means less publishers still).
Big newspapers and facebook win.
