Ad blockers don’t offer users enough control and are having a negative effect on online publishers. So says Brad Bender, VP of Product Development for the Google Display Network, speaking during today’s keynote session at our SMX East conference in New York City.
Marketing Land’s Ginny Marvin and Danny Sullivan spoke with Bender about the heightened attention on ad blocking since Apple’s iOS 9 came out earlier this month. As I wrote in my liveblog of the keynote, Bender says ad blockers are targeting both “good and bad ads” to the detriment of online publishers.
Ads are an important part of the ecosystem. They’re funding most of the free content we consume — the blogs we visit, the media we use. I think the ad blocking phenomenon is driven by people having bad experiences with ads. Think of pop-up ads, for example. The problem with ad blockers is that they’re blocking the good ads and the bad ads. We think it’s important that publishers continue to be funded.
Bender talked about developer Marco Arment, whose ad blocking app called Peace was an instant success in the iTunes App Store, and how Arment decided to remove the app because he didn’t like the all-or-nothing approach to ad blocking.
Like Arment, Bender told the SMX audience today that he’d like to see more user control when it comes to blocking ads.
I’d love to see it so that good ads are able to get through, and we go after the bad players — especially fraud and malware.
Google has a big stake in this discussion since almost all of the company’s revenue comes from selling online ads. Bender says he thinks Google’s text ads are unobtrusive, and the company’s focus is on making all Google ads “as useful and relevant as possible.”
For more on the ad blocking discussion and other AdWords and Google Display Network news, see our live blog of today’s SMX keynote session.
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