Ad Blocking vs. Mobile Blocking

Yes, So Very Sorry

For the past couple of weeks, AdLand has been awash in discussions about ad blockers. What was previously the province of a growing but tolerated number of techies is now mainstream behavior, ever since Apple supported the programs with their new platforms, and popular blockers have gone to the Droid system as well. With exceptional abuses like publishers producing 4X the memory bloat on trackers for cookies and ads as opposed to content, and data plans costing real money, it's easy to see why the apps are popular, despite the moral culpability. Besides, as the history of the music industry has shown, if you give people the technology to steal without any real threat of consequence, people will steal.

All of which has left me with one very small, and very out of touch and out of the demographic, question.

What is so wrong with the desktop and laptop experience that has made all of the traffic go to phones, anyway?

I understand, honestly, why some forms of content work better on mobile. If there is, well, Adult Utility going on, a screen that is more portable is clearly preferable. Certain dayparts are also going to be dominated by mobile. But what we're seeing from a data standpoint now is that it's not just the screen that is preferred in those hours, it's also the one that you use when you have the option to use something bigger, in the evening and weekends.

Why, especially when the mobile Web experience is so much worse than the desktop one, let alone something that puts you at risk for data issues that just don't exist on other platforms?

If you went to a print magazine and told them that they had to make a second version on much smaller stock, they just wouldn't do it. But everyone makes a mobile site.

Laptops are similar in real price (i.e., the lack of a contract) to smartphones, and dramatically less likely to be lost or dropped. They also let you type without the constant threat of error and/or auto-correct, and there's all kinds of extremely useful apps for those machines. Many of them with significantly less bugs and other issues. There's the nasty problem of people treating laptops as Work Only, and not wanting to put their personal browsing history on a machine that can be traced by an employer, but honestly. Having a second laptop isn't going to break the bank of most people.

There is, however, almost no sexiness in having the latest and greatest laptop. And that, really, is the crux of it, isn't it? Smartphones are stylish, customizable, and take away the point that people never really wanted -- the relentless literacy, since there's this big imposing keyboard that makes you type -- eww, words! -- and replaces it with an endless junk drawer of apps. Hoarding without the shame, on a screen no one will ever see but you.

If I were in charge of an upscale online publisher, I'd advertise my publication's full-size version -- aka, the actual Web site -- on my mobile site. I'd investigate having longer and better versions of my content that lived on full-sized hardware only. I'd put all of the cool Easter eggs that my content team could deliver on that site as well. Then, I'd price my ads to match the much better experience for full-sized viewing. I'd also try to put the ad-blocking software in place, again, for full-screen viewing only.

I'd also probably run the site into the ground in a month.

Which, judging from the hue and cry coming from online publishing over ad blocking, just means I'd get to the same place as everyone else. Just in less time.

But at least I'd have a dramatically better epitaph for that career.

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