Ben Shaw, Director of Global Advisory, WAN-IFRA, continued to talk about the ad-blocker issue, one of the four hot topics he mentioned in the conference opening.

Readers in Asian countries, according to Shaw, are becoming more aware of using ad-blockers to make pages load faster and improve their user experience. The trend of using ad-blockers in Asian countries keeps rising, with the highest 8 percent of Malaysian readers blocking ads, according to the report in PageFair. Shaw said this trend is hurting revenues of publishers more than those of advertisers.

In order to work out the industry priorities to deal with ad-block issues, Shaw showed several ways, not necessarily effective, that companies have been reacting to the increasing use of ad-blockers. Shaw said, some publishers ask readers nicely not to use ad-blockers, and it is normally not useful; some publishers ask readers firmly to stop using ad-blockers on condition that readers are not accessible to contents unless they do as they are told, and this could be helpful but not for sure. “The serious thing,” Shaw said, “could be tech escalation,” meaning anti-ad-blockers and ad-blockers fight with one another each time with a stronger force. 

After the inappropriate and ineffective ways of companies responding to ad-blockers, what should publishers do to deal with this issue? Industry priorities, said Shaw, should be put on these three areas: “to improve the overall ad experience for users without ad blockers; to find ways to encourage users with ad-blockers to agree to be served with ads; to focus on mobile-ready advertising opportunities that diversify online.”