How to save online advertising

My latest Guardian column, How to save online advertising, looks at the writing on the wall for ad-blockers and ad-supported publishing, and suggests one way to keep ads viable.

The mistrust between advertisers and publishers has given rise to a fourth entity in this ecosystem: ad counters. These are companies that generously offer to independently count the number of times the publishers serve the advertisers ads all the advertiser needs to do is tell the publisher to put the ad-counters beacons on their pages. Of course, ad counters arent charitable operations: they give away this independent counting function because it lets them gather titanic amounts of information about browsing habits. When you use Ghostery or Privacy Badger to examine a page and discover that a dozen (or dozens!) of companies are tracking your visit there, thats this dynamic at play.

Ad counters are really data brokers and theyre incredibly profitable. The data is sold to marketers, to governments, and to consumer-research institutions. The only reason that data can be economically captured and aggregated is because advertisers dont trust publishers, and insist on allowing ad counters/data brokers to act as trusted third parties to count ad-views.

The boom in ad-blocking technology is driven by three factors: annoyance at the content of ads; annoyance at the effect of ads in slowing computers to a crawl and worries about privacy. Advertisers and publishers can do something about the first two. In the early history of the web, pop-up ads climbed to a kind of terrible apogee before collapsing catastrophically because of audience pushback. Given enough pushback, advertisers will figure out ways to make their ads less obnoxious and less processor-intensive.

But the privacy concerns always a minority issue, now a growing worry are not so easy to address. Ashley Madison and the Office of Personnel Management werent the big leak-quake: they were the tremors that warned of the coming tsunami. Every day, every week, every month, there will be a mounting drumbeat of privacy disasters. By this time next year, its very likely that someone you know will have suffered real, catastrophic harm due to privacy breaches. Maybe itll be you.

How to save online advertising [The Guardian]