Those that make a living off of ads, like all of us here at Android Headlines, are not big fans of ad blockers like AdBlock Plus. Ad blockers take revenue away from publishers, and even app developers that use them to monetize their work. While ads can be annoying, it’s what pays the bills. Google, who makes about 95% of their revenue from ads, should be pretty pissed about the rise in ad blocking products right? Well actually not really. Wednesday, Google held their annual meeting with shareholders, and Larry Page was asked how ad blockers are affecting their revenue, and also how ad blockers may affect the ad-based model on the internet in the near future.
To be honest, Page’s response was a bit surprising:
“Yeah, we’ve been dealing with ad blocking for a long time. There’s been a number of different products to do that. Part of it is the industry needs to do better at producing ads that are less annoying and that are quicker to load, and all those things. And I think we need to do a better job of that as an industry. We’ve been trying to pioneer that. I think search ads are very good in that sense, and, in fact, a lot of places where ads can [be] block[ed], search ads do not get blocked because they are really useful. So I think that’s a really good example of what we’re trying to do. But I don’t think there’s been any major change in that dynamic in the last year or anything like that.”
Basically, Page is saying that the ad industry needs to do a better job at creating better ads. We see so many ads today that are in your face, and annoying. As well as affecting load times on websites. Many websites that have multiple ads are slower to load than those without ads. It’s something that ad companies need to be looking at. Page is right, in the fact that search ads do not get blocked. And that is probably where the biggest part of their income is in terms of ads. There are so many billions of searches done every day on Google and ads show up on every search.
Ads are a necessary evil, but we could live without the auto-playing ads on desktop and mobile, as well as the ads that pop up and over the content you are trying to read. Until those are gone, ad blockers are probably here to stay, unfortunately.