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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday August 12 2015, @06:50PM
Welp, I was wrong. Everybody has to keep squeezing more out of me. Slashdot has turned into a joke. News sites are ... well let's just say there's very little separating the news story from the ads. Now every page you go to has those dumb little arrows at the bottom so you can click to get the next little blipvert of information. Apparently, no, the 'free market' doesn't work. So, fuck it, I'm fighting back.
Now I have ad-block installed on all my machines. I have whitelisted a handful of sites that have never annoyed me with ads, but admittedly I only really do that when the site itself reminds me. Unfortunately I feel this will lead towards an arms race. More sites will try to cram those ads in there, utilities like Ad-Block will attempt to combat them. The idea of both sides going to extremes is... unnerving. That said, I do hold some optimism, eventually someone will set an example. That's what Google did, and for a while it worked.
So, yeah, I'm done. I'm an Ad-Block user. I tried to play fairly, and I was burned. You've tried vinegar, let's get back to honey.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:43PM
Just imagine if you had to pay for every site. How many would you really want to part money for and how many would you decide are not a necessity in your life and abandon? I reckon the number of abandoned sites would be so high as to be indistinguishable with 100%.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:54PM
Wow, that was long. I already started many years ago. But I started with adblock (not plus), and only blocking those ads which annoyed me. The idea being that if an ad annoys me, then they don't deserve that money; otherwise, why not? But the annoying ads got more and more, so I finally gave up and used ABP. And that was before I learned about tracking and malware in ads.
Today, I could in principle deactivate ABP because all my security plugins block anything third-party anyway if I don't explicitly enable it. But it's still a good second line of defence.