One way online advertising might change?
They say you can talk to a mule, but he only listens if you hit him with a board first to get his attention. For many years internet users have "talked to the mule" -- complained about intrusive ads. The industry has responded by using every new technology to make ads even more intrusive. So: ad blockers are the board, the advertising industry is the mule.
Use ad blockers. Recommend them to your friends, install them on your parents' computers. Let's see if we can get 90% of all ads on all computers blocked. Watch the ad industry's market for online ads drop toward zero.
Eventually content providers -- who get hurt too -- will demand that the ad industry provide safe, static ads. And that they certify them in a way which can be verified by ad blocking software. We get back to a situation in which content providers can make money from ads, but the displays never play video, they don't make noise, they never block content.
Then ad-blocking software will become a viewer-side control measure: if the ad industry begins to cheat and spam out intrusive ads under false certifications, then the makers of ad blockers -- who are, after all, primarily on the viewers' side -- will cut them off at the knees again. Viewers start to control what the industry can spam out. Not regulators, not industry-side watchdogs. Viewers control ads, by using their own software.
Of course the real world will probably work things out differently. I'm just suggesting that this is not a case in which either we have two or three loud animated ads blocking content on most pages, or we end up having no free content at all. It does not have to be either-or.
But we need to hit the mule with the board first. Really, really hard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
