Ad blocking may not be that big of a deal for mobile advertising

I’m not entirely convinced that ad blocking is going to impact mobile advertising as it is today.

Before getting into the why, let’s examine a few factors related to mobile advertising.

Ad blocking works by blocking JavaScript (JS) code from executing, effectively stopping ads from showing because ads are not even being requested in the first place. JS ad blocking are implemented on mobile browsers, and if I’m not mistaken, they don’t live outside of the sandbox of a mobile browser.

Mobile ad campaigns on two types of “inventory”, in-app and mobile web. And as far as I can see (I worked for AdMob, Millennial Media and now glispa. All of them are mobile ad platforms), the majority of the ad dollars are spent in-app through an SDK. Only a small portion are spent on mobile sites where JS ad tags live.

Why?

The answer is simple, performance and reach. In-app decidedly outperforms mobile web in terms of CTR or conversion rate (performance) and we as users spend more time in apps than sites (reach).

Advertisers watch ROI closely and allocate budgets accordingly. While they sometimes ask to run on well-known sites with a mobile version, at the end of the day, the majority spend goes to in-app instead of mobile sites on account of performance and reach.

Coming back to ad blockers, given that they are sandboxed in mobile browsers and most of the mobile ads we see are delivered in-app, i.e. outside of a browser, I fail to see how ad blockers could have that much of an impact in the grand scheme of mobile advertising.

Having said that, ad blockers could have unintended side effects, such as preventing commonly used web analytics tags from working properly, thus hurting site operators’ visibility into her audience. But again, app developers should remain largely unaffected as the analytics solutions they use, Flurry, Mixpanel, Localytics, etc. are SDK-based and is not contained within a browser app.

It could also impact a subset of native advertising products, specifically those in the field of content recommendation and marketing, i.e. widgets of recommended from the Web. Such solutions are mostly web based and are implemented with a JS tag.

Lastly, the rise of mobile ad blockers could also push publishers to look to in-app native advertising solutions. If implemented well, ads that are clearly labeled and blend in with rest of the content can strike a balance between the needs of advertisers, users, and publishers.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.