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posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 12 2015, @05:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-what-I-wanted-to-hear dept.

Ads have long been part of the trade-off for users of the free Web, but the rise of ad blockers is making it increasingly difficult for publishers to sustain that ad-supported model.

That's according to a report published Monday by Adobe Systems and PageFair, a startup focused on assessing the cost of ad blocking and proposing alternatives.

While PageFair clearly has a vested interest in illustrating the negative effects of ad blocking, the findings of its study with Adobe are difficult to ignore. Most notably, ad blocking will cost publishers nearly $22 billion this year, it reported.

Ad blocking has grown by 41% globally in the last 12 months, the report found, amounting now to about 198 million active ad-block users around the world.

There were some interesting geographical differences highlighted in the report, too. For instance, in the U.S., ad blocking grew by 48% over the preceding 12 months to reach 45 million active users by June. In the U.K., ad blocking grew by 82% to reach 12 million active users over that same time frame.

Meanwhile, those numbers will surely be on the rise on the mobile side, Adobe noted in a blog post, given that Apple's iOS 9 will likely include ad-blocking features in Safari by default while Adblock Plus is already available in limited beta for Android.

Ad blocking represents "a major, growing problem for both digital publishers and marketers," said Greg Sterling, vice president for strategy and insights with the Local Search Association.

In many ways, the ad-blocking phenomenon is a response to security and privacy fears that have arisen in the culture at large and a rejection of the state of advertising on the PC internet, Sterling said.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by gman003 on Wednesday August 12 2015, @06:02PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Wednesday August 12 2015, @06:02PM (#221791)

    Does my adblocker literally go into their bank account and drain their money? Does it literally pick cash from their pockets?

    No. It doesn't. This isn't a cost, it's a decrease in earnings. Many of the sites I browse with AdBlock on, are sites I would not go to if ad blocking did not exist, either because I couldn't bear the infection risk, or just because I wouldn't be able to see the actual content under all the ads. They are not getting advertising money from me either way - adblocking simply turns me from a non-reader into a non-profit-generating reader.

    They say $22 billion. I'd be surprised if that's within even an order of magnitude of how much more they'd earn without adblocking.

    Hell, sometimes I need to use Adblock just to make their sites functional. I'm constantly surprised by pop-up "share buttons" or navbars that a) I never use and b) make navigating the site harder.

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  • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday August 12 2015, @08:13PM

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Wednesday August 12 2015, @08:13PM (#221883)

    its not even a decrease in earnings.

    their earnings were forcast incorrectly. Not My Problem(tm).

    stupid marketing people are stupid. film at eleven.

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:01AM

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:01AM (#222010) Journal

      This is true for most cases these days, you can't claim decreased earnings if you are only paying for clicks.

      The days when you paid for IMPRESSIONS is long gone. Nowdays you pay for click-throughs.

      So unless you would have clicked at least one ad on the page, an adblocker deprives them of NOTHING and probably saves them money by not having to send and ad that you would ignore.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.