Billions Of Online Ads Are About To Die A Well-Deserved Death

Businesses that run annoying ads on your smartphone and laptop are about to get a rude awakening.

Not only are online ad blockers quickly gaining in popularity, now two very big companies will soon offer us new ways to avoid in-your-face video and animated ads, pop-ups, and other intrusive ads that plague our online existence.

Today, Sept. 1, Google will start blocking ads that use Adobe’s Flash software, employed widely by video advertisers, in its Chrome browser. And as early as next week, Apple is expected to release its new mobile operating software for iPhones and iPads that will allow the installation of apps that keep ads from appearing in its Safari Web browser.

These developments suggest a new era in which you’ll finally be able to zap annoying ads like those in the video above. For a variety of reasons, it’s unlikely that ad blocking alone will cause advertisers and publishers a big problem. But the fact that the two biggest forces in mobile phones are both cracking down on annoying ads means the online ad business is about to change in a big way.

Advertisers that depended on these ads will have to find new ways to get around our defenses. No doubt they will, since they always have. But in the near term, the biggest victims could be online publishers, which depend on the annoying ads for their already meager existence. Advertisers may be able to reach enough customers by simply shoveling even more ads at the poor folks who aren’t blocking ads, but publishers will never see revenues from ads that are never seen. (Well, mostly.)

For all that, I’d argue that ultimately this crackdown will a good thing, not just for consumers but for advertisers and publishers too. After all, we’ve seen before that people don’t mind some ads and even like to watch some of them--and not just during the Super Bowl. Think Old Spice’s “Smell like a man,” Snickers’ “You’re not you when you’re hungry,” and so on. Or think fashion magazines, where the ads are often more of a draw to readers than the stories.

As for online advertising, consider search ads: It’s not a coincidence that the most successful advertising business ever--that would be Google’s--is based on an ad format that is possibly the least annoying ever. You do a search and a few blocks of text ads come up related to what you searched for. Even if they advertise something you don't want to buy, they’re easy to ignore.

Then there are Facebook ’s ads, at least the ones it places in our news feeds. Some of them can be plenty annoying too, and the jury’s out on whether Facebook can resist running so many that we start to ignore them completely. But Facebook’s news feed video ads run without sound, making them moderately less annoying, and unlike typical banners they also can be swept out of sight easily on smartphones and even laptops.

Oh, and if Google is the king of online advertising, Facebook is the prince. These two utterly rule online advertising today, and each arguably offers among the least annoying ads on the Internet. Perhaps those two things are related?

Then there’s Apple. Part of its motivation for allowing ad blocking apps no doubt is to take a shot at Google’s business--especially given that Apple makes a decent business in advertising inside apps, which won’t be affected. Still, since search ads often are not blocked, in particular by AdBlock Plus, one of the leading ad blockers, let’s grant that Apple probably has the best interests of its users at heart.

And given that Apple users are a well-heeled bunch that buy a lot of stuff, advertisers will want to reach them. If they want to do that, they will have to behave much better, so that people aren’t tempted to install ad blockers in the first place. That should improve the quality of ads overall, just as Google’s search ads arguably did.

Fact is, online advertising is approaching a crossroads. Advertising technology known as programmatic has certainly grown the overall online ad business by making it more efficient and targeted. But too often that’s the technology that has been used to shovel more and more tonnage of these mediocre and annoying ads, a bit like late-night TV ads on steroids. (Or, to put it less mildly, a cancer, as Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, has called it.) That’s what’s creating a backlash among consumers and driving all of these efforts to rein in annoying ads.

Advertising is too malleable and people in advertising are too clever for me to think that even Apple and Google, let alone a few little ad blockers, will change the business overnight. Advertising always finds a way to reach us--I mean, everywhere.

But from here on out, online publishers--be they newspapers, magazines, social networks, or search engines--are on notice that the days of pelting us with annoying ads are coming to a well-deserved end.