The majority of the internet is supported by digital advertising, but they are hurting the revenues of publishers who make the content, apps, and services that we all use every day. When users go to a particular site, they find a piece of unexpected and unwanted music that starts to blare, or they can see irrelevant ads and get irritated since it annoys them most of the time. Some ads make the user wait at least 10 seconds before they can access the site they initially wanted to access. To make their work easier, users usually block all ads.
But most of these ad blockers cut the revenue for the sites. Google has come to its rescue. Last year Google announced Funding Choices to help publishers recover the lost revenue due to ad blocking. Even though Funding Choices is still in its beta testing stage, millions of ad blocking users are now choosing to see ads on publisher websites, or they are opting to “whitelisting” the site. In the last month, over 4.5 million visitors allowed the ads and added over 90 million additional paying page views for those sites.
In the upcoming weeks, Google is expanding its Funding Choices to over 31 countries. It will help publishers from those countries choose between two options: allowing ads on a site or purchasing an ad removal pass through Google Contributor. Google will try to develop it to make it more efficient. They have already started a test allowing publishers to use their propriety subscription services within Funding Choices.
When a user arrives at the site of the publishers, what Google Funding Choices do is that it allows the site to display one of the three message types to that user, conveying the message of how using an ad blocker hurts their business and content. One of the message types is a dismissible message that does not restrict access to content. The second one is a message that blocks access to the content until the user chooses to show all the ads on that site. The third type allows the user to access the content by paying a particular amount of money. On average, publishers using Google Funding Choices see 16% of visitors allowing ads on their sites, while some other publishers see rates as high as 37%. It also allows them to have a conversation on their sites with the users. The goal of Google is to help the publishers get paid for their work, reducing the impact of ad blocking on them.
