Ad blocking software has caused quite the panic across all digital industries, especially online media companies who earn most of their money from ads. Today we’re going to talk about how this might impact online gambling, given that a lot of developers and online casinos use ads to attract new players.
Affiliates will have to make a lot of changes if they are currently driving the majority of their traffic to operators via banner ads. Franc Goebbels from RevenueEngineers.com had this to say “For an affiliate new to this the best place for them to start is to invest in third-party ad serving and to stop relying on the third-party ad serving of the gambling companies.”
Andy Scott of Digital Fuel Marketing also advises people to avoid third-party hosting “It is possible for affiliates to host the banner themselves and hardcode it onto their site in the same place that they have the advertising space so that if the user blocks the ad they see their hosted banner instead.”
It seems that the overall impact of this on the industry might be not that huge over time. A study done in Q2 of 2014 found that 144 million people per month had an ad-blocking plugin or extension installed on their browser. But gambling companies can go around this by reading the URL string for attribution purposes.
Only time will tell how this will affect the industry overall but I’m pretty sure it won’t directly affect a lot of the online gambling sites which are popular today.