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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."
even put an ad up!
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.
Mute the TV. Fast-forward recorded TV. Screen the calls. Block the ads.
Fuck'em if they cant take a joke.
I love how they quote figures for "losses to online publishers" with a confidence interval of 100%, while completely failing to address how GDMF ANNOYING the modern web is if you don't block ads. If I couldn't block ads on sites I otherwise like that choose to run super annoying ads, then I would simply block the entire site and not visit any of the "content" there. Hey online advertisers: Here's How To Keep People From Blocking Your Stuff With This One Weird, Old Trick! All you have to do is stop being so annoying. Really, that's it.
Nope. Not how it works. Not getting revenue from someone who wouldn't have clicked on your link if it were full of adware (for them) is not a "cost." The actual cost is in bandwidth, etc. and is much less than beelions of dollars.
it's because ads are pollution of the mind, advertizing agencies (not just on the internet) commoditize people's brain runtime without asking their permission, and people generally FUCKING HATE IT.
Gee, what a surprise...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You mean "deny". This is like saying a fence "cost" a wolf some chickens. I understand paying for content by watching ads... but the popups, the tracking, and the auto-play videos are getting out of hand.
The industry loses money because they don't understand their mistakes.
I don't mind seeing ads in their little corner, not flashing, clearly labeled as such. Hell, I even welcome targeted ads!
But when an auto-loading, auto-playing full page Flash add with sound suddenly pops over my screen and scares me to death while I'm trying to read an article... well then fuck you, I'm gonna block the shit out of it and everything that comes from that website until the end of time.
Many games I found and play were initially found by me through ads. So ads do help. They're just, for most part, intruding and badly designed.
The ad industry doesn't understand that AdBlock is an effect, caused by their shitty race to make ads "more visible". I guess they're a victim of their own "success".
I've seen websites that don't let me view any content on them if I have AdBlock, I blacklisted them entirely.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
And now all of these companies will try to claim we're "stealing" revenue from them by not viewing ads.
Sorry, but we're under no obligation to watch your damned ads. We don't owe you the ability to display stuff on our screens, nor do we owe you the revenue associated with this.
Boo fucking hoo, the mean old internets are stopping allowing you to make money for embedding crap in our web pages and providing a vector for malware.
That's simply tragic.
But you can bet the lobbyists are hard at work telling the politicians this is a vital part of the economy and if people are allowed to block ads world will end.
Bloody parasites.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
“It is tragic that ad block users are inadvertently inflicting multi-billion dollar losses on the very websites they most enjoy,” said PageFair boss Sean Blanchfield.
Failure to generate revenue apparently is a loss.
Everyone on earth is losing trillions every second.
They aren't losing. It isn't costing them. The public chooses not to participate. The web companies can make pages not load at all if the ads are gone but they don't cause they know the public will leave them like rats leaving a sinking ship.
That was my motivation to use Flash Blocker - got really tired of my computer coming to a halt and occasionally having Firefox crash due to badly written ad scripts. The companies buying the as need to pay more attention to the quality of the scripts.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I have no objection of watching ads.
Really? Because I do. I particularly object to pop-up ads, interstitial ads, large banner ads, and ANY ad that tries to track my behavior or browsing activity. Ads waste my time, intrude on my privacy and sometimes are malware vectors. I never have any interest in whatever crap they are trying to sell me so pretty much all the ads are nothing more than a waste of my time. My attention is valuable to me and I don't give it out for free. I don't buy shirts with large brands on them because I'm not being paid to promote them. If an ad company wants to pay me directly for my opinion on a product we can talk but it's going to be a direct negotiation most of the time.
I'm willing to pay for content which I think I have a reasonable chance of finding valuable or enjoyable. I occasionally purchase/rent/go-see movies. I subscribe to some journals. I subscribe to a few websites I find valuable. But if a company wants to use ads as their primary revenue source then chances are good I'm going to block or otherwise circumvent their attempt to hijack my time and attention.
After all, it's the bread and butter to support a lot of sites.
Their shitty business model is not my problem. If your business depends on pushing obnoxious ads and tracking my activity then you deserve to be blocked.
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).
I wish they would focus on shifting ads away from the current "be as annoying and in your face as possible" trend, and over to more non-intrusive forms of ads. I'm sure the reason ads have become so obnoxious is that it leads to more clicks, but that so many now choose to block them might be a good indication it's time to reevaluate.
My adblocker accepts non-intrusive ads by default. Get your ads on that whitelist and the problem is solved. Personally, I don't care about a static image or text box. I do care about blinking pop-overs with audio. Whenever I get a "we see you are running an ad-blocker, would you mind telling us why?" questionnaire from a website, I tell them the same thing.
While most americans may be content with things like the 'welcome back we'll be right back' nature of television and radio, its actually a pretty glaring annoyance for the rest of us. turning everything into a commodity is a very recent notion, and not one I might add that many people care for.
I block routes to known advertising servers, and i use the firefox microblock plugin for anything else. what advertisers often completely neglect is that theyre on my bandwidth. I pay the bill, i decide the content, end of discussion. the ads are often just another vector for exploits in the browser. The product almost never pertains to me, and i dont want it to. I dont want advertisers dickriding me into the sunset trying to exploit my personal interests. Instead when and if i need a product i want advertisers to focus on what the product does, and how well it does it. Do not pander endlessly about how good or noble a person im to become if i dole out cash for the product.
Good people go to bed earlier.
They asked us to punch the monkey... and we did. What do they expect with dropper-infested, bandwidth-hogging, slow-loading, auto-play with sound enabled "advertising" they keep showing on us?
They turned cable into never-ending commercials, people responded by record-and-skip and cable-cutting. They turned media sites into never-ending commercials, people responded by blacklisting and blocking advertising. I think the advertising industry shows clear pattern of shitting the bed, as such this is of their own making.
Well, I'm of two minds on this subject. I have never installed adblock and its ilk, because I know that "free" content comes at a cost. So as much as possible I sit through commercials from network TV's streamed shows, I allow sidebar ads to populate some screen real estate on websites, etc.
But I have my limits.
I suppose in the end that makes me no better than folks who aggressively block every single advertisement in any form -- "We already established what kind of woman you are; now we're just negotiating on the price". But it helps me sleep better at night knowing I'm at least willing to try to give them some of my attention in return for free content.
I'm amazed they're not accusing ad block users of stealing.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Rise in insect repellent use costs malarial mosquitos millions of gallons of blood and new disease victims.
That's next. Anti-piracy in music was originally framed as "costing" the publishers money and then later framed as outright theft.
Not happy about this. Now that "normals" have slouched onto the blocker band wagon the ad pushers will develop more aggressive techniques plus deny content to blocker users (more than they do already.) Blockers only worked because they weren't popular; there are a LOT more ad-mongers than there are blocker makers.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
said PageFair boss.... this is the problem.
I remember the old days, WebHostingTalk forum in fact, that had ads, only they were embedded into the page. The site operators themselves had a pdf of the site demographics, users, visits and suchlike and would offer advertisers a number of banners or images they could send to the site in exchange for a set amount of cash. That worked - it was difficult to block those ads without blocking other parts of the site (though it was still possible, I don't think anyone did it though as the ads were not excessive).
The ads were also closely targeted towards to site demographics - no ads for lawnmowers on a forum discussing web hosting!
But then... we got Google adwords and the other middlemen who insisted that putting ads on your site was something they'd take care of for you, and you'd get loads more money as they'd be targeted at the users based on user's past preferences (ie they could charge the advertiser more because of some bull about only showing them to people interested in them) and they would only take a small cut of the proceeds, whilst the site operators suddenly find they can jut put this widget here and .. loadsamoney, with no effort required.
And this is why your damn OS phones home continually, and there are more ads popping up and flashing at you than ever before, and many of them are useless anyway (like the time I went looking for some new windscreen wipers, I bought them and for a fortnight afterwards I was bombarded with ads for wipers that I would never buy because I just had some brand new ones!).
So, too bad, I have zero sympathy. If a site wants to host adverts directly, I will typically not block them and the adblockers won't have them in their lists anyway. To the numerous rip-off ad merchants.. fuck you. Put that in your damn tracking cookies.
An ad blocker "costs" an advertiser NOTHING. The whole narrative is wrong.
Is ad revenue reduced? Yes. But that is not a cost. It's a reduction in income or a reduction in gross receipts. A "cost" is when your expenses increase, not when your revenue decreases.
Adverts are little different than the email spam that used to clog many an inbox. Adblockers are no different than spam filters.
No, trust us, this is a good ad.
Those ads that hack your monitor, by taking up all the space? No, we promise this one won't do that. Oh no, we won't sign our name to it, or a sign a document saying so. But trust us, this ad won't hack your monitor. It uses up only some of the space, not all of it.
Those ads that hack your browser, by popping up or popping under? No, we promise this one won't do that. Oh no, we won't promise or be accountable, but this one doesn't ignore browser settings like that.
Those ads that hack your inputs, by spoofing a close icon, or tying events to it? Or by looking like a system message? No, we promise this one won't do that. Of course, it could, at any moment, if our jobs depend on it or we are paid off, but we promise it's a good ad.
No, this is a good advertisement.
It's designed to hack just YOU. You should allow this to happen. You believe that only gullible or weakminded humans are affected by advertisements. We believe otherwise, and we spend millions of dollars on this topic, but you're probably right. It probably won't hack you. It's just designed that way, crafted by decades of doctorates, trial and errorred in a multibillion dollar industry. That model of a homunculus in your head is probably correct. You aren't even gonna be affected by this advertisement. After all, if you could be affected by the advertisment, then it would mean you are a human. And humans clearly aren't affected by those, just as long as they are strong willed and intelligent. No, no study has ever shown that correlation, but trust us.
This advertisement will just hack you. It will create a sense of fear, and offer to calm you. It will create a sense of dissatisfaction, and attempt to satisfy it. Were you hungry? Did you have a need to eat? Here's a picture of some food. And people enjoying food. I'm sure that has no affect on you. Here's a picture of a willing mate, a happy family, some offspring. Certainly you aren't some emotional wet robot that is subject to this.
I'll just put all this ball of mind poison right here. It won't pop up, pop under, be boring, be annoying, ring bells, have a fake close key, stutter, install a toolbar, or anything else.
No, this is a good ad.
It just hacks *you*.
Especially if you don't think that's possible. Please don't think that's possible, or you might question this whole thing.
I think the question you need to ask yourself is when you're on your death-bed will you think, "boy, I sure do feel guilty for viewing all those corporate websites and blocking the ads and thus, their potential revenue", or "boy, I sure do wish I had all that time back I spent watching ads, being distracted by ads, closing pop-ups."
For me, the only valuable resource in the entire universe is my time. And I will fight very hard to protect it.
I agree completely. I'm OK with seeing a few ads if they support the free content I want to access. If that's the business model we're going with, then so be it. Slashdot itself broke my own camel's back, though, with the amount of crap I saw even after I clicked "Ads Disabled" (because of the amount of crap I was seeing). My decision was reinforced after the most recent monthly session of Dad Cleans Up The Kids' Gaming PC from all the junkware they'd installed (my youngest is 7; sometimes he doesn't make the best choices).
Sorry, ad industry. I was willing to work with you but you made it too hard to accept. This is your own fault.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Lets say I have a website about cats. lets say it gets 1m views a day
I put a banner ad up at the top that gives people seizures that should pay 1k/mo for 1m views
The addition of advertising to my website causes my daily view count to drop to about 800k
So now it only pays 800/mo. this still pays for server maintenance and bandwidth.
But I want a new Dice bobble head doll so I add a bunch of pop under,pop up,redirects and sponsored content.
This makes the view count drop down to 500k but now 97% of users use adblock so I only make $15/mo on the 15k users that don't know how or are unable to use adblock.
So to compensate I add even more offensive advertising (and some malware redirects for good measure) to my website that pays better.
But the stats don't change much and I make much less than when I started out.
Now 490K People use adblock that didn't use adblock before.
Thus I have irreparably damaged my user base as even if I go back to just the one banner ad I will never be able to get as much as I did with that single banner ad when I started out.
Plus those adblock users now block ads everywhere not just my site which increases the percentage of adblock users on other websites even those without obtrusive advertising which in turn causes their ad revenue to go down.
Oh woe is me those thieving ablock users should have just put up with cryptowall, malware, popups, pop unders, redirects,sponsored cats, nasty and annoying advertising.
Its all the adblocking users fault its certainly not anything that I have done.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
Don't you think it's ironic you have, on this article alone, plastered at least a half-dozen spam posts that are essentially ads. Do you have anything that would let us block you?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
After seeing this spammed all over this page, I know what adblock software I'll *never* use
This is the reason I proudly browse with Ad Block Edge.
Content paid for by ads is not produced in my interest, but in the interest of the purchasers of the ads. In most cases it would be better if whatever is paid for by ads were not produced at all. That would make the voices of those speaking to share their thoughts, relatively louder in the marketplace of ideas, compared with the voices of those speaking to attract eyeballs in a way that won't reflect badly on a brand.
To an extent, content in the service of ads BECOMES an ad. I crave what is left when nobody can make money off the internet.
The rest can fsck off and die.
If something only exists in a form paid for by ads it is either 1) not necessary for anyone to create without the ads given the easy availability of ad blockers, but would be available if the existing sources went away or 2) is garbage or at best empty calories.
If a site wants to require ad-blockers be disabled to view the content, let them. I won't view their site if it's too hard to get around their ads. I won't link to their site because I won't view it and so won't know what's published on it. And neither will any of the people who use ad-blockers. And since people clever enought to know what an ad-blocker is, ( a low bar, but a bar nonetheless ) these tend to be the most savvy, interestin, and the most apt to generate traffic by their actions. The site that enforces no-adblockers soon gets forgotten.
Unless the site serves up tripe appealing to the lowest common denominator. But then it needn't bother blocking ad-blockers because its audience is literally brain-dead, and won't install them. But if they DID force viewing of ads, then well, nothing of value was lost.
...
ABP doesn't spam on forums...
- Raynet --> .
when will you write an application that actually works? Because you know, I gave yours a try, and after 50 minutes of being unresponsive I had to kill it. If you don't know how to merge sort lists of strings, then I question the rest of your application. And also I block all those sites on my firewall, no need to do that on the hosts file.
it helps me sleep better at night knowing I'm at least willing to try to give them some of my attention in return for free content.
I feel better blocking all ads and knowing that I've contributed to pressuring websites to find an alternative model to stay afloat.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Can the HOSTS file block these incessant ads about the glory of the HOSTS file? Is it truly the final solution that will forevermore remove the blight that is APK Hosts File Engine spam? If so, sign me up!
You shouldn't respond to APK guy with your actual account. Now he is going to stalk you.
Shouldn't that be a Slashdot achievement by now?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm surprised I didn't see Privoxy mentioned in the comments. It may not be as effective or updated as regularly as many browser plugins, but it's the only way to block ads across your entire network, on ANY device. This is one of the reasons I never encounter ads in iOS apps/games with iAds. I've been using it since the days of Internet Junkbuster, before ad-blocking plugins even existed. Aside from blocking ads, Privoxy has some other privacy enhancing features as well.