Hey peeps,
Hope you had a blast of a Christmas!
As we are to embark on Boxing Day in Commonwealth Countries with online retailers trying to squeeze a few more sales before the end of the Holiday Season, which was predicted to surpass regular sales this Christmas, we do learn that advertising hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Despite the last couple of years that adblockers tried to give users a seamless experience by removing all ads from websites, we have learnt that more and more website would just deny access to users of adblockers, such as Forbes.com:
This isn’t coincidental, as when a user does not pay a tribute, a website cannot be considered sustainable in the long run.
With the transition from paper based journalism to online journalism, the business model has changed drastically.
Classifieds that are absent to most degree on online papers as well as declining revenue in brick and mortar papers (as people were unwilling to continue paying for subscriptions), have led to online papers demanding a subscription in order for users to read the news, such as the Financial Times:
Google tried addressing this issue, by offering users to receive an ad-free experience for paying to remove these ads, via its Google Contributor program where users were required to pay $6.99-$14.99 on a monthly basis to remove all (or most ads) from sites they were visiting.
As per the program, that was launched to a great success in November 2015, a website owner who was running ads on one’s website via the Adsense program and was in danger of not receiving any revenue to keep the website running on account of adblocking, received some of the proceeds in order to continue the Adsense and naturally Adwords program as advertisers who failed to see any conversion per their ad efforts as well as publishers who failed to see revenue coming via their Adsense accounts would just opt out of the program, driving Google’s main revenue channels down.
Google has now decided to shut down its Contributor program as for January 2017 and refund all its users whatever they had left for January 2017.
This comes to no surprise, as Google (as well as Facebook and others) wishes to remove adblocking in different techniques, as more and more websites either adopt native ads to show ads despite ad blockers, decline to offer a user access without turning off the ad blocker or simply demand a monthly subscription to not show ads to the user.
The online real estate has completely taken over advertising space as more and more users opt for mobile or desktop relief as opposed to billboards and television (with open source free broadcasting initiatives such as Kodi taking over rapidly, kicking PPV and commercial cable networks to the curb in terms of revenue via online subscribers) to escape annoying ads, and Google has decided to combat this phenomenon by punishing users who wish to opt out of ads, as Google (in our humble opinion) wishes to keep Adwords and Adsense relevant, while losing precious revenue to competitors such as Facebook or Twitter ads.