The online advertising market is huge already and is expected to grow further, from $125.82 billion in 2014 to $220.38 billion by 2019. This represents a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.9% from 2014 to 2019.
Bearing that in mind, you will understand the fierce, even personal attacks among the competitors in this niche. One well known company in this niche is AdBlock – an incumbent, established name that earns money by blocking ads and having companies pay them to whitelist them. So AdBlock will block your ad and put customer first if you are not paying. If you do pay, then the customer doesn’t matter and Ad block betrays the name it carries and blocks nothing.
The quarrel between AdBlock CEO Tim Schumacher and Brave and BAT founder Brendan Eich started after a third user tweeted that his Chrome AdBlock plugin isn’t blocking the ads on ZeroHedge website and adding that Brave did its job 100%.
Eich responded by explaining why did the user see the ads – because of the business model of ABP.
In case you didn’t know, Brave replaces publishers’ ads with other ads (https://t.co/hOvCmrXXBY), while ABP has publisher-friendly standards, allowing publishers to make money with unobtrusive ads.https://t.co/qa8rGopnTy
— Tim Schumacher (@TimSchu) November 18, 2018
That triggered an angry response from the ABP CEO who resorted to straight out attack on Brave and later on on the Eich himself. The ABP CEO stooped low and tried soiling his reputation with claims he was fired from Firefox, which Eich denied. He even made an ultimate juvenile move and kept misspelling Eich’s first name.
The two continued discussing the business models of their companies, seeing ABP CEO claiming the two firms are similar in the way they earn their money. Eich didn’t agree with that and made an important distinction: “The difference with our model is we only pay publishers, they do not pay us — we do not extra up to 8 figure fees from publishers in order to white-list ads which then might actually perform. Google pays tens of millions to make several billions. Everyone sees through this, Tim.”
The debate saw couple of more exchanges, tweets with substance entwined with snarky comments:
Oh, Brandon, you’re lying again, by falsely comparing relative % values with absolute values. I thought you’d be smarter than that.
Fact: in both models publishers pay up to 30%. Nothing wrong with your model, it’s your legitimate form of AcceptableAds. Just stop throwing stones
— Tim Schumacher (@TimSchu) November 18, 2018
Overall, it is easy to conclude that incumbent tech is feeling the pressure of the new and probably better solutions. The fear is so pervasive that otherwise serious adults renounce good demeanor and hit way below the belt.
