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It was my first day of class as a first-time Skype instructor, so I got right to it: "How many of you pay for content?" I asked a dozen or so University of Iowa journalism students as the fall semester got under way at my alma mater. Two, maybe three, gently raised an arm. Then came my follow-up question: "How many of you use ad blockers?" Nearly everyone put a hand straight up, proudly admitting to installing software that snuffs out display ads from their daily Web browsing experience. "That's wonderful," I said. "You don't want to pay for content and you don't want to see the ads that fund the content you don't want to pay for. You might want to consider another profession."
Those U of I journalism students are not alone. At the dawn of the Internet as we know it, the news industry committed what some call "original sin" -- giving away digital content for free. Some 25 years later, getting students or anyone else to pay for news is just about impossible. That first sin brought on another, certainly in the consumer's mind. Publishers, FORBES included, turned to ads of every shape and size -- and lots of them -- to devise business models without subscriber revenues. Next, ad agencies brought on animated ads, many slow to load on a page. Then, startups developed ad technology to target marketing messages to consumers. Now, it's come down to ad blockers, at first an industry annoyance, today a full-blown dilemma. An estimated 200 million consumers use ad blockers, 45 million in the U.S. alone. Some know what they've gotten into. Many do not, believing ad blockers totally protect them from malware and other Internet evils. Most don't know how to turn them off if they wanted to.
Where's this headed for FORBES and others? Publishers and ad blocking companies (Germany's Eyeo is one of the biggest with AdBlock Plus) are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game. Ad blockers work by blocking a list of known urls/domains associated with companies that serve ads (industry leader DoubleClick.net, a Google subsidiary, is among them) to sites like Forbes.com. Some ad blockers will approve, or white list, a publisher's ads if they're deemed acceptable -- but only for a fee. To some, this screams extortion.
Axel Springer, the hard-nosed German media company known for taking on Google in Europe over content aggregation, recently took ad blockers to court and lost. Then it said nein to those trying to visit its tabloid Bild.de newspaper site using ad blockers. Axel's position: turn them off and get the digital site for free or pay up for an ad-light subscription. If a publisher gets too aggressive, ad blockers can get testy, threatening to disrupt the JavaScript code that renders editorial content.
Right before the end of the year, FORBES joined the tussle, as did Conde Nast's GQ a few days later. Give or take, 13% of visitors to our site have installed ad blockers, predominantly on the desktop machines. That compares to 40% at sites attracting the most tech savvy readers. Still, with 43 million domestic monthly visitors to Forbes.com (as measured by comScore), 13% adds up to a good size city of people who aren't seeing ads on our site. And that adds up to real money.
PageFair, which provides solutions to publishers looking to recapture revenue lost to ad blockers,... [+]
So, that led us to ask ourselves, What if we cut back the number of ads to consumers who turned off the ad blocking software when visiting Forbes.com? And that's exactly what we did. Since Dec. 17, 2015, a small percentage of those with ad blockers received this message:
Thanks for coming to Forbes. Please turn off your ad blocker in order to continue. To thank you for doing so, we’re happy to present you with an ad-light experience.
The remainder of visitors using ad blockers became the control group. They didn't receive a message and continued to have full access to the site. We didn't detail the ad-light experience because we plan to test numerous options. In fact, for an unspecified time, those who turned off ad blockers are not seeing any Welcome ads, which many consumers find annoying, nor will they get interstitial video ads between pages or video ads that unfold in-line with the reading experience.
The reaction to our testing was swift. A handful or two of our ad-blocking visitors who got the message took their criticisms to Twitter. Staffers, fearing fewer readers for their work, expressed worried confusion. So did a few contributors who are part of our audience-based incentive pay model. Notably, the most concerned contributors were those who write about video games as gamers were early users of ad blocking technology. We also heard from contributors who post through ad-blocking corporate networks. They've been unable to double-check their published work. We're still working through these concerns.
We've also been made aware of numerous glitches in our testing. In some cases, our messaging and execution was inconsistent -- turning off the blocker still blocked a visitor or leaving it on still permitted access. Other public reports of issues are also being monitored, with as of yet no confirmed direct correlation with our ad blocking tests.
The data so far has taught us a lot:
2) 903,000, or 42.4%, of those visitors turned off the blockers and received a thank you message.
3) We monetized 15 million ad impressions that would otherwise have been blocked.
As important, the ad-light experience has focused our attention on faster delivery of our digital screens to consumers.
FORBES has helped lead in the way in digital news. We launched our site in 1995 with a separate digital newsroom. We implemented a controversial contributor model in 2010 that's been imitated by others. We've also been aggressive with our Web advertising strategies. We boldly moved into the programmatic buy and selling of ads before nearly everyone. Our BrandVoice native ad program, also launched in 2010 and somewhat of an antidote to display ads, was roundly booed before the biggest news organizations eventually developed their own versions. As the industry grapples with fake traffic, ad viewability and whatever is to come, FORBES will continue to chart its own course. That means doing what every news organization, traditional or startup, must do sooner or later: produce the best possible consumer experience that works as a business.
