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On Reflections of a Newsosaur, newspaper veteran Alan D. Mutter discusses some statistics concerning the rise of ad-blocking that many content providers might find disturbing. In the last five years, the number of consumers blocking ads has multiplied by ten times, to over 180 million. The reason for this huge increase is probably the rise of ad-blocking browser plugins that make installing blockers easier than when it was necessary to use external software.

While that makes up only 7% of global Internet users, blocking tends to be concentrated in western countries. For example, a Reuters survey found that 47% of US users and 39% of UK users were found to block Internet advertising. 30% of US users and 39% of UK users were also found to ignore ads even if they didn’t block them.

Most ad-blocking has happened on the desktop to date, but given that Apple is enabling ad-blocking on iOS, it’s going to increase on those from here on out as well.

Mutter notes that many web publishers are paying outfits like PageFair to let them bypass ad blocks, and posting messages warning readers that too much ad-blocking could drive them out of business, but none of those strategies seem to be having any effect on the number of people blocking ads.

The problem advertisers face is that they simply gave consumers too many good reasons to block ads. If they weren’t annoying and distracting, they were bandwidth hogs. If they weren’t bandwidth hogs, they were outright security risks. They can allow advertisers to track your browsing, or downright install trojans on your computer. Even if they weren’t annoying, they’re no longer worth the risk, as even the companies that claim to offer “acceptable ads” have proven untrustworthy or downright vulnerable to hacks.

More and more, I suspect that the increase of ad-blocking is going to drive the next major change in the delivery of online content. Consumers are fed up and are increasingly dropping support for sites that use intrusive advertising–and even sites that try to use less intrusive advertising (for example, TeleRead) are collateral damage as it’s easier for ad-blockers to just block everywhere indiscriminately than go through and try unblocking sites one by one.

I wonder what the blogosphere and Internet news arena will look like in five years? Will sites go out of business or change the way they earn their revenue? It may be interesting to find out for most, but it might be a bit more than just “interesting” for we who depend on ads for our paychecks.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Chris: “The problem advertisers face is that they simply gave consumers too many good reasons to block ads. If they weren’t annoying and distracting, they were bandwidth hogs. If they weren’t bandwidth hogs, they were outright security risks”

    That says it all. I have never minded targeted ads such as they have on Goodreads and Amazon. Many I find quite useful, but some sites would start loud videos, a multitude of pop-ups, etc. Frankly I hope those sites go out of business. I have started using Ghostery which shows beacons and all sorts of other crap on sites designed to track one’s activity. I don’t mind one or two, but when I see 30-40 it’s a bit much. It’s gotten to the point where I only go to a few trusted sites and the heck with everything else. That’s not healthy for a vigorous web in the long term but they are doing it to themselves.

  2. Apart from regular food and hygiene supplies, I buy roughly one item every two days. Since I look at about 50 web pages every day, any system which puts even one pop-up ad on each page is going to be an annoying distraction 99% of the time — even if it happens to show me exactly what I want for the remaining 1%. But of course it doesn’t. It shows me what it wants me to buy; and the percentage of times that corresponds with what I want to buy is — let’s be generous — 1% again. So I’m being asked to give screen space to 9,999 ads in return for the chance of seeing an ad for what I want to buy, when I want to buy it. The same system provides no help at all for 99% of my purchases, and the relative convenience of going somewhere via an ad rather than simply to eBay or Amazon or some other easily-found site is negligible.

    My point is not that some ads are offensive and some are not. My point is that the overwhelming majority of them are entirely useless. Even if they were all charming pictures of fluffy kittens, the ratio of useless to useful ones would ultimately make them infuriating.

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