Ad Block software was initially thought to be a small-scale problem, but it is really starting to boom in 2015. According to a new report from Adobe and PageFair, an Irish company founded in 2012 that measures the cost of ad blocking and displays alternative non-intrusive ad blockers, $21.8 billion in global ad revenues have been blocked/lost in 2015 so far.
The chart below shows how ad blocking users has grown from 21 million in early 2010 to 181 million in 2015. Over the past two years, it has seen the biggest increase from 54 million to 181 million.
According to comScore, there are approximately 250 million PC internet users in the United States. The Adobe-PageFair data argues that about 18 percent of the US Internet population is blocking ads with some kind of ad block software.
This report estimates there was $5.8 billion in “blocked revenue” in 2014 in the US. Numbers are expected to reach $10.7 billion this year and 20.3 billion by 2016, showing ad block is going mainstream, and starting to seriously affect revenue.
Numbers vary when it comes to what web browser has the highest number of ad block installations. Chrome has surely seen the greatest installations thus far, but Firefox and Safari have seen increased an increased amount of ad block growth as well.
The report drills down even more showing ad blocking occurs most with young, tech savvy and male audiences. Naturally, the sites relying upon those audiences are seeing the most lost revenue because of this. Social networking and gaming sites are taking the biggest hits from this.
Ad blocking mostly happens on the desktop at an astounding 98 percent. However, we all know it’s a mobile world and ad-blocking extensions do currently exist for the mobile versions of Chrome and Firefox. In addition, iOS 9 plans to allow ad-blocking apps in the future. This could show that mobile ad blocking will grow in the future, especially when the ad-blocking community becomes aware they are available on mobile.
Overall, ad-blocking is seeing numbers increased and ad revenue is being lost accordingly. If the mobile world catches on to the ad-blocking trend even more revenue will be lost. The full report can be downloaded here.
Based in Rochester, New York, Netsville is an Internet Property Management company specializing in managing the Digital Marketing, Technical, and Business Solutions for our customers since 1994. For more information, please click here.
