Ad Blockers Challenge Web Pitchmen

The booming growth in online advertising, which has helped fuel the Internet economy while annoying legions of Web surfers, is being challenged by a fast-growing category of computer programs that is poised to become the mute button of the computer age.

Going under such names as WebWasher, InterMute and AtGuard, the programs automatically eliminate all advertising from Web pages, fulfilling the consumer dream of entertainment unfettered by the intrusions of Pampers and Rogaine.

The emergence of these ad blockers has marked the consumer backlash against the pulsating, candy-colored wave of advertising that has spread across the Internet, slowing the surfing experience to a dog-paddle pace at times.

“They are a symbol of people saying, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore,’ ” said Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group software consulting firm.

The ad blockers, many of them available for a free trial download at the developer’s Web site, are becoming a standard part of software tool kits sold to speed up Web surfing. In the last few months, such established companies as Siemens of Germany and WRQ Inc., a Seattle maker of networking software, have introduced ad blocker programs, lifting the product into the software mainstream.

International Microcomputer Software Inc. of Novato, Calif., a producer of consumer and business software, will bring out its ad blocker in the next month to join the dozen products on the market.

Although ad blockers are still a niche product, they exert pressure on advertisers to reevaluate the strategy that has made ads more intrusive. The changes could duplicate the effect that the mute button had in reshaping television advertising from a preachy minute of spiels to a quick-cutting flood of images.

“It’s a new market,” said Anne Marshall, marketing manager for AtGuard, an Internet utility program that includes an ad blocker. “The Web sites are in charge now. We just want to give people a choice. This is an opportunity for people to have the Internet the way they want it.”

Online advertising firms dismiss the ad blockers as a minor fad that will eventually become irrelevant as high-speed Internet connections make their way into the home. With faster connections, even advertisements that require large amounts of data, like a full-motion video of exploding soup cans, could be sent across the Web in seconds.

They also argue that consumers have made their peace with online advertising, accepting the fact that the money it generates--about $2 billion last year--is a primary reason that so much of the Internet is free.

“Consumers understand the basic proposition that all the free things are enabled by advertising,” said Rich LeFurgy, chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Advertising is what is transforming the business model.”

The sudden spurt in ad blockers, which first appeared as early as 1995, follows the boom in online advertising over the last four years. In 1995, ads generated a paltry $50 million in revenue. By 1997, the figure had jumped to $907 million and finally to an estimated $2 billion last year, according to NetRatings Inc., a Milpitas, Calif.-based Internet audience measurement firm.

The last two years have been a heady but curious time for advertising. Revenue has been increasing at a blistering pace, creating a variety of unusual opportunities, such as Free-PC.com’s offer to give away computers in exchange for targeting users with ads.

At the same time, there have been signs that more people are ignoring the Web’s ad banners. Over at least the last year, the rate at which people actually click on the ads to get more information has steadily declined.

NetRatings, which has been tracking the “click rate” for the last year, has found that it is now about half the 1.35% of early 1998. In other words, out of every 100 viewings of a Web page, an advertisement is clicked on less than once.

But Tim Meadows, an analyst for NetRatings, said the click rate itself is not a very good measure of advertising effectiveness since people still see the ads even if they don’t click on them.

Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, asserts that people are annoyed with Internet advertising and have learned to ignore it. “This is called banner blindness,” he said.

He believes the declining click rate has driven advertisers to adopt ever-more-aggressive measures to capture attention. The traditional banner has become a still-life compared to what has emerged in the last year.

Today, there are musical advertisements that will not turn off, pop-up advertisements that open new windows in the browser, “interstitial” ads that take control of the browser between loading other pages and animated pitches that shake, rattle and roll on the screen.

“It’s all a cry of desperation,” Nielsen said.

In many ways, online advertisers are trying to duplicate the visual power of television advertising. The rapid scene changes, high color contrasts and constant motion of modern television were driven by the ease with which viewers could tune out a channel, said Trudy Kehret-Ward, a marketing lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

The difficulty for online advertisers is that creating engaging images in the tiny space offered by banner ads--with the tight restrictions on the amount of data that can be transmitted over the Internet in a reasonable time--has proved to be a daunting problem.

Each new twist in advertising on the Web has brought another leap in the size of the computer files required, which slows the time it takes to download Web pages.

“The ratio of advertising to content is incredible,” said Alex Chernyakov, creator of the Naviscope ad blocker and Internet accelerator. “Ad blockers aren’t here to take down the advertising industry. We’re just doing this to speed things up.”

Battle of Ads and Blockers

The simplest solution to increasing download speeds is turning off all images on a Web page--a function included with most browsers. But such an extreme measure would eliminate a feature that drives the Web’s popularity.

The solution proposed by ad blockers is to filter out advertisements and leave other images intact. As it turns out, the task is technologically trivial.

Most advertisements can be spotted by their distinctive size and coding. The typical banner, for example, is just about the width of a computer screen and usually includes some variation of the word “/ad” in its file name.

In addition, many advertisements are routed through the computers of major ad service companies. Thus, an image that comes from DoubleClick Inc. or NetGravity Inc., two of the leading Internet ad service companies, are immediately flagged as possible culprits.

The blockers can be easily defeated by changing the size of the advertisement or eliminating the word “/ad” from their file names, but it would only provoke a fruitless arms race with the blockers.

“It would require changing the whole structure of a Web site,” Chernyakov said. “They could spend millions on it. We could add a few new keywords [to defeat them] in a couple hours or so.”

Rick Jackson, vice president of marketing for NetGravity, said an arms race could force companies to embed advertisements deeper into the content of Web pages to prevent them from being filtered.

LeFurgy, of the Internet Advertising Bureau, discounted the possibility of a gory technological battle between advertisers and ad blockers. More likely, he said, is a subtle shift in advertising away from annoying, molasses-like ads.

WebWasher, InterMute and AtGuard can be downloaded from the Internet at https://www.siemens.de/servers/wwash/wwash--us.html and https://www.intermute.com and https://www.atguard.com.