There's an ongoing debate, some would say panic in 'ad land' which includes the agency eco-system, who its seems, are keen to perpetuate an advertising model which has been broken for sometime, for many its literally killing the ad industry and its bottom feeders.

Without a doubt they are losing our attention, and with that change in behaviour there's huge disruption taking place - you see they're all stuck between giving us intrusive ads, paywalls, or if your a paying Sky subscriber - both!.

As the global increase in audience behaviour for 'ad skipping' and 'ad blocking' combined with continued fraud associated with programmatic continues to rise unabated, it is vital that content owners, creators, broadcasters & advertisers establish non-intrusive audience friendly viable alternatives for generating insights, attribution and revenues from what is still a growing appetite across all channels to consume content.

In summary, you and me (the audience) don't want those intrusive ads being 'pushed' at us anymore....but, we still want the content!  

Without a doubt the (advertising) industry is in meltdown, as they struggle to adjust from old school 'push/intrusive' advertising models to 'pay walls & pain walls'. The growth in access to technology that's empowering audiences to take charge around how, when, and where they consume content has required a radical and innovative rethink of how everyone in the content eco-system can sustain commercial viability!

The culprits are well-known. Google and Facebook have an iron grip on digital ad revenue. Publishers are trying to save themselves by making wholesale shifts in their business models, but they can’t transition fast enough. There are a number of things going on. At a high level, digital publishing has failed to diversify, having put all its eggs in the advertising basket. 

Then, the platforms came for advertising. Most digital ad spending today is going to a handful of tech companies, leaving just a few scraps for publishers to fight over. Facebook has hurt in other ways, cutting back the referral traffic it sends publishers, and has only started to help publishers monetize their content there. Publishers that took a distributed approach, thinking the revenue would follow, have found otherwise.

The current debate around the disruption in ad land is about whether or not you and I recognise that adverts are simply the price we pay for subsidised access to content. Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime etc are all offering us subscription based ad free movies, TV shows, Music, and other forms of content, a model that's also being pursued by many other content providers who are now offering 'paywalls' to allow you to engage with the content they provide. 

I personally subscribe to many 'industry' related online news sites, I utilize them many times in order I can share with you my thoughts on what's going on in the industry. Over the last 12 months I've started to see my once 'free' eat all you can access being reduced to bite sized chunks before being hit with the 'paywall', or as I like to call it the 'pain-wall' - I now find I'm 'unsubscribing' to the ones that tease me with a few words, and then ask that I pay for what is essentially curated content gathered from the internet, or paid writers. 

And after all that free sharing, and engagement as well??

Now don't get me wrong, as someone who creates an awful lot of content I can certainly understand that none of this is done for free, someone has to pay for those big blockbuster movies, the music created by amazing artist, and TV shows for us all to binge watch, and if I were to pro-rata my cost versus the time it takes to give you all my ramblings in blogs, post, and Vlogs then I would need to charge you a hefty price, but that isn't my motive, nor is it my business model.

We've already entered into the world of free 'content discovery', this fundamental shift is already disrupting how companies win and lose out to competitors, the consumer (you and me in case for you forgot) are already saying 'we don't want your intrusive ads' so as the debate, and the move to more and more 'pay walls' continues just what is your strategy to compete in the world of Millennial's and Generation Z' who by the way don't want to pay for anything, and can't even get their head around why we all put up with all that intrusion.

As much as you might want things to remain the same the 'Genie' is well and truly out of the 'Digital Lamp'.