Advertising Online #1 - Agencies vs. Ad-blockers, Who will Win?

It appears that we humans are quite adaptable. In a relatively short time, nearly all of us have learned to ignore ads on the internet. The best way to prove this is through eye tracking studies that capture exactly what we are looking at on a web page. A great visual representation of this is through the use of heat maps that show the greatest concentrations of attention as red, lesser attention as yellow and finally no color markings for areas of the website that failed to capture any attention.

For example, the image above shows the result of an eye tracking study done on three disparate websites with the results displayed as a heatmap overlay of the site. The ad spaces are clearly marked by the yellow boxes. As you can see, all of our attention is on the content section of the website - the areas marked in red and yellow.

To make matters worse for advertisers, browser plug-ins are growing in popularity that block 99% of all advertising from ever reaching the intended audience. For example, Adblock Plus is a 1-click plug-in install to your browser that was downloaded 363,934 times last WEEK. That is roughly 19 million downloads a year which is equivalent to 27% of all US households with internet connections. It is also likely that those that install ad blockers skew towards the more educated and higher income brackets - which advertisers covet.

As advertisers and interactive agencies get more desperate to grab attention by jumping into the content space with expanding banners, overlays, and rich media ads it is all too likely that users will respond by downloading even more ad blockers. They certainly work well. Here is Kidzworld.com without an ad-blocker (click here if you don't see it).  If you still don't see it, check to make sure your ad-blocker is turned off.  Ad-blockers have already figured out how to block ad network widgets (this one is from Clearspring):

Here it is with Adblock Plus (a free plug-in that took 30 seconds to download and install). Which side are you going to bet on?