It All Comes Back to Ad-Blocking...

On this, the final week of my first semester at Syracuse, I thought I should circle back to a topic discussed over our first immersion. It's a topic that will surely gain traction in the months to come so I think it's a good topic to close on.

Ad-blocking software will rapidly change the advertising and publishing space. Traditional digital advertising, those leaderboard and banner ads of old that go mostly ignored by the trained digital reader can now be blocked easily with a little piece of software. Publishers will need to invest in new ways to monetize their digital content, whether it's via custom content pieces for brands, or an unexplored technical method.

During our immersion, when tasked as groups to brainstorm ways to plan for the rise of ad-blocking many of us came up with solutions based around providing readers custom advertised experiences. However, one idea never discussed and which is the subject of a recent article in Scientific American called "How to End Online Ads Forever" is micropayments. What this means is that a website could in theory go completely ad-free, and to make up for this loss of digital ad revenue, a publisher can enforce a micropayment system in which a reader would be charged a small fee to access a piece of content. This allows for transparency between reader and publisher; rather than forcing a reader to purchase a subscription for reading content a publisher can charge a la carte. A reader then won't be stuck with unwanted long-term subscription. Sounds like a great idea, except:

“Micropayments sound great on paper,” former BitPass CEO Douglas Knopper told me. “But in practice, they require four things for the consumer that are hard to pull off: simplicity, ubiquity, security—and it has to be free. The economics to the retailer don't work, because there are too many middlemen—credit-card processors, etc. So until someone figures out how to crack the code ... micropayments aren't going to get any traction.”

So in the end, who knows what will come of this? It's certainly something to look out for. I'm certainly still partial to our groups idea of a subscription based model to drive ad-free content with a way to allow readers to customize their own ad experience if the paywall fee is not paid.