Ged Carroll

Online advertising targeting

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Ad blocking has become a thing; with a UK government minister likening it to a protection racket kneecapping online advertising targeting. This felt similar to  the the early 2000s and political action against file sharing.

A cursory glance of publicly available data shows a few  things:

This starts to paint a picture of something being broken in the way advertisers deploy targeting technologies and the way targeting technologies work.

Government regulation is only likely to delay industry change. If the music industry is an analogue to follow ad blocking would look at legal means to slow things down and then technological means to resolve the issue.

The bigger question is, is the problem resolvable? The ad industry is being squeezed on multiple fronts:

More information

IAB Ad Blocking FAQs 2015 (PDF download)
IAB Believes Ad Blocking Is Wrong
Adblocking is a ‘modern-day protection racket’, says culture secretary | The Guardian
Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers – telecoms edition
Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers