Better Online Ads Promised by the Ad Industry

Apple’s online ads blocking technology Internet came faster than we might have expected and has made an impact on the future of the internet. The Internet Advertising Bureau on Thursday acknowledged that it had failed Internet users, pursuing automation and optimization that made money but at the expense of consumer loyalty.

Scott Cunningham, senior vice president of technology and ad operations at the Internet Advertising Bureau the industry organization that represents over 650 different organizations, including many of the biggest global media outlets, has acknowledged that they’ve messed up. He wrote, “”As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.”

Over the last month, the explosion in ad-blocking apps has shown how much pent-up consumer demand there was for removing ugly, invasive, memory-hogging and insecure ads from their mobile devices and computers.

Advertising revenue is what ad-supported publishers often depend upon however this has caused the consumer experience on today’s Internet rather unpleasant. In fact, as of reading this, you may be annoyed by the ads that overlay or surround this story.

Aside from the frustration about busy pages, ads can also eat up limited data plans and drain precious battery life. What’s even worse is “malvertising” which infect unprotected devices with viruses and rootkits, and can give unauthorized users remote access to your computer.

The ad industry’s tech lab promise to do better can be seen with the development of “L.E.A.N.” ads for hundreds of IAB member companies around world. Basically, L.E.A.N. stands for “Light, Encrypted, Ad choice-supported, Non-invasive” ads.

However it is uncertain whether the industry can successfully deliver ads that require less bandwidth, are more secure and actually honor our choices about what types of ads we want to view and where.

It is most likely that more consumers will use ad blocking technology to block all ads, if the ad industry doesn’t succeed which could be disastrous for online publishers and media companies — especially smaller, independent media outlets.

Adobe and PageFair, an Ireland-based firm that tries to recover ad-blocked revenue released a study in August, have estimated that almost 200 million people worldwide have installed ad blocking software in their Web browsers, which in return could cost publishers $22 billion in 2015 alone.

There’s also another factor that lead to this response from consumers: Popular companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple are developing their own approaches to hosting “Instant Articles” and news inside their own platforms and sharing revenue with news organizations which resulted to moving some media output away from the open Web entirely.