What's the strategy for making advertising on Google and Facebook (+Instagram) - where the majority of all online advertising outside of China occurs - significantly less effective?
Google controls search, Android, Chrome and the Android app store (along with of course YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail, three other giant services). Facebook has its own massive walled off kingdom that exists nearly entirely in apps where they can heavily control ad blocking.
Google nearly doubled its sales in three fiscal years, from $74b to $136b. Something that big doubling in that span of time, is extraordinary. They'll probably hit near $160b in sales for 2019. I'll take the bet that a giant that large, entirely dependent on advertising, will continue to figure out how to insulate itself from ad blocking by controlling the territory around it.
Your premise will always be a non-starter so long as the ad giants control their own sprawling acreage (which they will fight to the death to retain, because it is life or death to them). The ad giants have made sure to control their own destiny, they saw the ad block threat plainly a decade ago or more and moved to stay out in front of it.
True, hence the rise of DNS based content blocking like pi-hole. Sure, it is trivial for apps to workaround it by using a custom DoH impl themselves, it hasn't been done yet.
Another possibility is to patch the apps, ref YoutubeVanced
Yet another possibility is to run an app within a user-land emulator on the device and block content and deny requests. See: VirtualApp
Ad-blocking might hurt in some future with hypothetically high enough percentages of traffic.
Right now they make ads more effective (marginally). By self selection, a population with relatively low click-rates has removed themselves from having any money spent on them. This helps Google and Advertisers since right now, the volume of available impressions is plenty high, the name of the game is targeting better.
If anything, ad blockers just hurt select publishers who can potentially see a large volume of their potential ad traffic blocked.
If this were true, nobody would be getting mad about ad blockers. But both advertisers and publishers (big and small) regularly complain about ad blockers, and even with a relatively small portion of users installing a blocker, multiple journalism sites have started adding paywalls. This paranoia isn't restricted to small sites either -- Google's even listed ad blockers as a potential revenue problem in investor disclosures.
A couple of potential causes: maybe it's that impressions actually do matter to revenue in some cases and we haven't completely moved over to conversions yet, or maybe it's that advertising increases consumer spending even without direct conversion rates, or that most publishers are engaged in fraud and ad-blockers make it harder to do that. It might even just be that publishers/advertisers are all stupid and haven't realized that ad blockers don't matter, but I think that's unlikely.
What seems plausible to me is that most of the people who block ads are not as immune to advertising as they claim. If they didn't block ads, they would occasionally click on an ad and provide a conversion. I would not be surprised to see that exposure to advertising increased overall spending, and didn't just redirect it to specific companies. I could be wrong though, maybe it's something else. I'd be interested to see research on that kind of thing.
Regardless, it is very difficult for me to square the world you describe with a world where a huge fraction of news sites I visit are including banners that tell people to whitelist ads, or anti-adblocking technology outright, or are just giving up and switching to subscription models. I can't think of an explanation for that other than, "ad blockers decrease revenue", and I think that having an explanation for that behavior is a prerequisite to making a believable claim that ad blockers aren't hurting revenue right now.
I mean, Google's not dumb. They would not have wasted time on the acceptable ads initiative if they didn't feel like they needed to.
> maybe it's that impressions actually do matter to revenue in some cases and we haven't completely moved over to conversions yet, or maybe it's that advertising increases consumer spending even without direct conversion rates,
I mean you're right. Branding campaign spend just wants to eat up impressions and don't care much for click or actions. They're a large amount of $$ spent, but they also benefit the least from tracking so they can basically be shown to anyone. Tons of available inventory for them. But there's tons of money in more targeted CPA, CPC ads too.
Disclaimer: I mostly knew things from the RTB angle maybe 3 years ago. I may be out of date with where things are at.
I wonder if that applies to income as well, are people with higher purchasing power more likely to block ads. My gut feeling is yes.
If advertising moves off of the web onto other channels and mediums, then necessarily the economics of the web would still change, right? Taking revenue away from a single medium will still alter the economics of that medium.
Mozilla isn't trying to change the economics of the entire market, they're trying to change the economics of specifically web content.
In reality, ad-blocking is already priced in and slowly being recovered. All it did was create a new addressable segment of tech-savvy/ad-resistant consumers. The slack is now recovered in first-party walled-garden platforms, native advertising, "influencer" and other underground techniques.