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The online ad industry has a strangely hostile relationship with those who
consume its products
FROM quantum computing and smartphones to self-driving cars, home thermostats
and delivering the internet by balloon, Google or, technically, Alphabet, the
holding company that the firm established in 2015, has its fingers in many
pies. But the company s main business, which pays for all of its dabblings
elsewhere, is digital advertising, which in 2017 accounted for more than 86% of
its $111bn revenue. It may seem odd, then, that Google s latest move is to aid
ad-blocking. On February 15th Chrome, its web browser, which has a 59% market
share, switched on code to block certain online advertisements.
In doing so it joins an established trend. By last year around 27% of American
internet users had installed ad-blockers, according to eMarketer, a research
firm (see chart). Third-party ad-blocking software is available already for
Chrome but only for its desktop version. As well as being built in and thus on
by default, the new blocker will work on smartphones.
Web publishers will not welcome another threat to the efficacy of advertising,
their main source of income. Google at least promises that only pages which
display the most annoying ads those that automatically play videos with sound,
for instance will fall foul of its new filter. What counts as annoying is
defined by the Coalition for Better Ads, a group of advertisers, technology
firms and other companies of which Google is a member.
Such infuriating ads abound. The online-ad industry has over the years
developed an unusually hostile relationship with those to whom its products are
served. In the early days of the internet, jiggling, brightly coloured
animations were common. Pop-up advertisements, some of them uncloseable, became
so prevalent that browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator
were modified to try to stop them. Ads may be more sophisticated now but still
find ways to irritate. Dodgy ones are a popular delivery route for malware.
They are injected by criminals into legitimate networks, then displayed on
respectable websites.
If ad-blocking makes the web a safer and more enjoyable experience for users,
however, the trouble is that fewer ads being seen could mean fewer websites.
The ad industry, indeed, is in an arms race with blocker-writers. Many sites
now try to detect ad-blockers, and force users to disable them if they want to
visit websites. The ad-blockers have retaliated with techniques to dodge the
detectors, and so on. Some publishers, meanwhile, have been adapting in their
own ways. Salon, a news site, invites ad-blocking visitors to let the site
borrow their computers to mine cryptocurrency as another way to make money.
Google s move thus looks like an attempt to save online advertising from
itself. Chrome s strong market position means it can oblige advertisers and
websites to comply with minimum standards, removing the most annoying dross
whilst lessening incentives for users to install third-party blockers that
screen out almost everything. It is also launching a service called Funding
Choices that is designed to allow website operators to invite people who use
ad-blockers to pay small amounts to view their pages instead.
Its new products could land it in trouble. Margrethe Vestager, the European
Union s competition chief, tweeted last year that she would be closely
following the firm s ad-filtering efforts. The worry is that by defining what
counts as an acceptable ad Google will amass still more power over online
advertising. The European Commission fined it 2.4bn ($2.9bn) in 2017 for
giving its price-comparison shopping service preferential treatment in search
results over rival offerings. It was unclear that users of such services lost
out much. Consumers also have lots to gain if Chrome can help stem the ad
onslaught.