Ad Blocking: Can the digital disruptors take their own medicine?

In this guest post Tristan Tobin argues the very people who disrupted the media industry now need to show they can adapt themselves to survive the rise of ad blockers.

Does anyone else get a rush a Déjà vu from this ad-blocking debate? Ever since the printing press put scribes out of work we’ve been hearing the same argument, “liberating content from the existing revenue model will be catastrophic.”

When the internet starting taking print media apart in the early 2000s, many digital pioneers poised to make a fortune had only glib sympathy for the print news business model. They sucked their teeth and remarked, ‘times have changed.’ Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

The incumbent online ad platforms have plenty to lose if the current model changes, but surely this doesn’t mean they have nothing to play for? Is the online ad industry, the darlings of disruption, honestly trying to tell us you should only have to win once?