Slashdot Mirror
Study: Ad Blocker Use Jumps 41 Percent
Mickeycaskill writes: A report from Adobe and anti-ad blocking startup PageFair says the number of ad block users worldwide has increased by 41 percent in the past 12 months to 198 million monthly active users. The study suggests the growing popularity of ad blocking software is set to cost online publishers $21.8 billion in 2015 and could reach $41.4 billion by 2016. "About 45 million of them are in the United States, with almost 15 percent of people in states like New York and California relying on these services. The figures are even higher in Europe, where 77 million people use versions of the software. In Poland, more than a third of people regularly block online ads."
In this day and age of malware being delivered even by supposedly reputable third-party providers, using an ad blocker is just plain responsible browsing. I'm sorry that web site owners are out some revenue for it, but if you want to make money off of me, you're going to figure out some way to do it other than leaving myself open to attack from malicious users.
There are a handful of web sites that I actually support financially specifically for this reason.
Ads have gotten ridiculous. Hardly a week goes by where I don't get notified of an attempted malware attack on my comp while browsing, usually from malware on ad sites. And that's with adblock running. And if it's not malware, it's the fake security software and update notices.
In some cases, ads take more than 70% of screen real estate. A quick check shows the /. homepage has 8 ads on it.
It was the autoplaying video-adverts that flipped me over (about 6 months ago). I tolerated them when they first appeared, but once they defaulted to having the sound switched on, it was clear that the situation had gone beyond reasonable bounds.
The advertising industry should do whatever it can to make life unpleasant for those companies that rolled out those noisy monsters. I was prepared to tolerate ads up to that point, so that particular development has cost the industry a good few ad-views (and I doubt I'm alone in having found the game of "which browser tab is making the noise" to be my breaking point).
Last time I used some mainstream social networking sites without AdBlock in a VM, it took about 10 minutes before the virtual machine was chock full of scareware, its CPU was pegged, and it was scanning the LAN.
AdBlock isn't just for ads, it is a vital tool in security, arguably more important than antivirus software, because it stops the malvertising before it gets on your machine. In fact, if one has AdBlock, a click to play utility, and sandboxes/VMs the Web browser, that takes care of almost all attacks out there, except for Trojans, which can be combatted by running questionable executables in a VM, or just pasting the file's hash into VirusTotal's site and seeing what comes up.
currently running adblock plus and I never see ads... something is wrong with your settings.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
We decided, a long time ago, that the web would be supported by advertising.
Who is this "we"? I wasn't given a vote, and I certainly don't agree. Ad blocking is a reasonable defense against the ongoing attacks from ad companies.
For an eye-opening experience, try a mozilla browser with noscript and request policy extensions, and no other ad-blocker. Start with default-deny rules and see how many third-party scripts and third-part site requests are being made from sites you visit.
Noscript lets you enable scripts from specific origin sites, but request policy controls which third-party requests are allowed from each site. Together, you can see just how much absurd ad and user-tracking crap is being fetched from each site. With patience, you can figure out which subset is needed for a site to function, while leaving all others disabled. Often, busy sites divide themselves into static content, CDN for icons and images, separate site for user-generated content like uploaded images or even comments, separate ad networks, separate analytics/tracking vendors, etc.