The online ad industry has finally promised to make ads less annoying

With how popular ad-blockers have become recently, it’s clear that online advertisers are doing something wrong, and even though those mistakes have been pretty damn obvious to us for years, the advertisers themselves are only just now starting to understand that they messed up. The advertising trade association Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) even admitted as much in a recent blog post, where it owned up to the fact that the online advertising industry has “lost track of the user experience.”

Since Apple made its mobile operating system compatible with ad blockers, Internet publishers and other online content creators have fretted that their primary source of revenue could dry up. And last week, Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages, which will give publishers the ability to create web pages that load faster—but also means that bulky advertising may not run on the pages if they significantly slow down loading times. Suffice it to say, advertisers need to find a way to offer ads that are less intrusive and more secure. In a blog post on Thursday, the advertising trade association Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) copped to the fact that advertising has become too bloated and has slowed down the Internet. “We messed up,” the post reads. “As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience… The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.”