Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer claims that native ads will win if ad blocker use continues to rise
Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has stated her belief that native advertising could be the beneficiary of a growth in the use of ad blockers.
Speaking at IAB MIXX in New York as part of Advertising Week, Mayer was questioned about her views on ad blockers which prevent adverts reaching online platform users who have downloaded them.
She claimed that she believed that the experience of the web "becomes a lot less rich" with their use and that it would "get worse" as a result.
"The internet is such an amazing outlet, as is mobile, and all of that has been supported by advertising and it allows us to take all of this content, both commercial content and sponsored content, and make it available online," she said before adding that her own company eas only able to grow through serving successful adverts to its audience.
"On the business side there is a very clear reason why we want the Internet to keep progressing and we need to make sure we have business models that work and advertising has worked well for the Internet. I also think that it makes the Internet better from a personal level, that's why I don't think ad blockers are the right way to go from a user level."
Mayer stated that media platforms had a "responsibility" to ensure that adverts remained "vibrant" to prevent the user's switch off and added that more transparency with users over tracking and suggested that the allowance of control for users to switch off certain tacking would help that.
She then went on to offer her thoughts on what would happen should ad blocking continue to grow in its use, stating that it would only mean the growth of native content.
"The more the advertising and sponsored messages are like the content around it the more of a reason you are giving users to not turn that off because it's actually very content rich. It's like the article post they are viewing right next to it that wasn't sponsored. We are big believers in native ads because they enhance the user experience and are much less disruptive and they are great properties in terms of value they give to advertisers," Mayer concluded.
Earlier in the day, Yahoo announced that it was to merge all of its programmatic technology under the BrightRoll banner and revealed that Yahoo had 600 million active users a month through mobile.