ad blockers Archives - Argyll Free Press

Who are the ad blockers and most importantly – why are they blocking?

In the past couple of months we’ve been constantly hearing about the surge of ad blockers on Apple’s iOS. This adds to the ever growing trend of ad blocking. According to the latest infographic made by Global Web Index, the profile of your average ad blocker is somewhat the same across the globe.

More than a quarter of internet users across the interwebz are using an ad blocking service – in Europe, it has surpassed the 30% mark. This trend is led by teenagers and young male adults.

Ad blocking is on the rise and there’s no obstacle in place for it.

Moreover, those who choose to block ads seem to spend a lot of time online on a daily basis i.e. those who use the world wide web for financial purposes. The biggest concern is that businesses are using their personal data to sell it to various advertisers.

Another motive for people wanting to block pesky ads is the fact that they just want to work without any unwanted interruptions. Yet, this assumption is somewhat inaccurate. The UK-based Internet Advertising Bureau conducted a survey via YouGov that took into consideration 2,000 adults. About 52% of them said that they want to block all the ads that they encounter.

The rest 48% noted that they just simply want to block certain types of adverts on particular sites. However, 73% of them added that they block ads on sites that obstruct their browsing experience – like huge hard-to-close pop-ups that appear out of the blue while reading an article.

Fifty-three percent said that they find the format and design of ads annoying – bright and popping colored ads tend to be infuriating.

Forty-six percent noted that they block ads because they think they are not relevant for them.

The SVP of Internal Sales at the Teads ad agency, Jeremy Arditi believes that the advertising industry needs to do something about ad blocking in order to keep the internet free – more exactly, nobody wants to make content creators set up a subscription plan, because then, everybody will lose something.

Arditi ads that they, the ad industry, need to better engage the user, not find better ways to interrupt their browsing experience. Arditi continues by saying that finding new formats on how to expose ads less invasive to consumers is crucial. We need better placed ads to give the consumer the ability to somehow control what he does and does not want to see.

Yet, every ad blocking service has a white list and the majority of users tend to add their most visited websites on it so their favorite content creator gets paid one way or the other.

Are you one of the ad blockers? Why are you blocking ads?

Image Source: 2

Advertisers are tearing up looking at this year’s numbers: as much as $21.8 billion estimated to be lost because of ad blockers. Publishers are pointing their fingers and nodding their heads at the naughty users who are downloading and using browser extensions to keep their screens ad free.

If you haven’t been living under a rock in a cave in the mountains in the last decade, you probably know the internet is saturated with advertising. They’re there before the movie trailer begins, they’re blinking at you obnoxiously when you’re searching for pasta recipes and they even try to lure you in by claiming you’ve won a set of spoons.

So it’s no wonder ad blockers use has spiked in an equal proportion with that of advertisments. Not only a few users feel overwhelmed by ads, with a big chunk of internauts raising their eyebrows at YouTube’s pre roll ads and choosing silent ads on Twitter.

There has been a 41% ad blocking growth in the last year. A quick look at Adobe and Pagefair’s data lets us know 16% of all the users in the United States use ad blockers, while browser extensions have quadrupled in the last two years world wide.

The numbers are even higher in some European countries like Poland and Greece where as much as 34.9% of internet users keep ads at bay with ad blockers.

While Youtube, Facebook and Twitter users enjoy ad free time on their gadgets, publishers are thinking up strategies to regain their lost territories and keep feeding us ads on top of ads. There are the adepts of the tough route: unless you use ad blockers, you’re banned from their site.

Others took a gentler approach, politely asking their users not to install ad blocking softwares. The Guardian‘s approach is one of the smartest. They used their ad banners to let the user know they’ve detected ad blockers.

The banner goes on to ask the users if they wouldn’t mind supporting the Guardian “in another way”. By clicking the link, you can become a supporter.

Advertisers seem so hurt (well, they are bleeding money), they feel obliged to remind us we’re sort of breaking an unwritten contract here. We, the internet users, receive free content from them, the publishers, in exchange of tolerating ads. With this broken ecosystem, what’s in store for internet users?

In the long run, we could be looking at ad blockers becoming so widespread the advertisers are compelled to use ads that are less invasive and simpler. We could live with that.

Image sources 1, 2, 3

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