Battling the world’s worst pandemic crises, media industry has a new enemy to deal with.
The Ad Blocking software had posed a new challenge for the digital media that had been emerging as a proxy of print. It had come as a big jolt for the newspaper owners opting to switch over to digital platform to combat revenue crises in the print industry.
The software available in different names is proving to be controversial with many news companies whose ads it blocks. With the available option, the visitors are utilising the software to remove ads from the websites and prefer the Internet that way.
As of now, the companies developing the software appear to be surviving legal challenges. The BBC reported that a German court ruled in favor of Adblock Plus in a suit filed by two German newspapers seeking to have the software ruled illegal and anticompetitive.
Interestingly, the use of Ad Blocker has been on rise among the millennial generation. A survey of American Internet users conducted by PageFair, a European startup that researches ad blocking and intrusive online advertising, observed 41 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 use ad blocking software.
The same report found the number of people blocking ads on Google Chrome increased 96 percent from midyear 2013 to midyear 2014, and the number blocking ads using Firefox rose 21 percent.
Adblock Plus, PageFair, and other organizations, including reddit and The Anti-Advertising Agency, created the Acceptable Ads Manifesto for users and companies. The manifesto offers guidelines on ad formats and techniques, characterizing “acceptable ads” as those that are not annoying, do not disrupt or distort page content, are transparent and effective without shouting at users, and are appropriate to the site.
According to the manifesto, “blocking all ads deprives legitimate websites of critical revenue and stops perfectly good advertising from being seen.”
