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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.
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).