Jeff Li's Blog

“The media industry is facing a moment of reckoning.”

Ad-blocking softwares have been around for years, but recently there have been a tremendous increase in the number of users who uses them to block online ads. The percentage of Internet population using ad-blockers on desktops have reached to 20% for Canadians and 16% of U.S in 2015. This become even more devastating for the digital marketing industry when Apple decided to allow consumers to download ad-blocking softwares in Safari. In the foreseeable future, more and more customers would be using ad-blockers to increase the loading speed for the websites they intent to browse.

It’s an absolute dilemma for web-advertisement industry. Users choose to use ad-blockers is an indication that they are unsatisfied with the experience they had browsing the websites. Thus, they are looking for ways to enhance their experience through blocking the ads on a website. On one side, to track more loyal customers, companies wants visitors to have a good user experience on their website. On the other hand, if they don’t put ads on their websites, especially small-medium sized companies, they have no resource to create more content out.

As both users and E- Marketers we should drastically rethink about the way we interact with internet ads. For users, perhaps disabling ad-blockers for sites that are niche and needs more support. For marketers perhaps think of ways in which you can generate your revenue from other methods so that you can both keep the browsing experience clean while still have the resources to produce more content.