Did ad blocking become “over-dramatized?”
After French publishers banded together to make a dent in that country’s ad blocker usage, they recently got together to talk about the effort’s successes and failures. “The problem of ad blocking is still there,” said Bertrand Gie, head of new media, Le Figaro, in Digiday. “But it’s gone from an over-dramatized problem to a professional problem.” The real threat, he said, is if blocking moves more heavily to mobile browsing, rather than desktop. Wanna place bets on whether that will happen?
Read more at Digiday
…and speaking of mobile browsing…
Brave, a new browser that mediates the ad buying/serving process and acts more or less as an ad blocking browser, has released the newest version of its product for Android mobile phones. A VentureBeat review of the product explains that while the first Android version used a bubble-based interface (which TechCrunch called “cumbersome and confusing“), the second version looks more like a traditional tab-based browser. It also makes it easier to keep tabs on what kind of marketing and tracking services the browser is blocking.
Read more at VentureBeat
Netflix aims ads directly at ad blocking viewers
Black Mirror, the often dystopian Netflix series about the dark side of technology, serves as the theme at the heart of a new Netflix campaign that identifies and speaks to users who use ad blockers. Playing off the series’ voyeuristic themes, the tagline says “You cannot see the ad. But the ad can see you” before asking the viewer to enable cookies and some data tracking.
Read more at Mashable
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