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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: 5, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:21PM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Wednesday August 12 2015, @07:21PM (#221854) Homepage

    My computer. My rules.

    You seem to be unaware of how the Web works. I ask somebody for something. They can send it to me or not as they please. Often, they include references to other things they think I might appreciate in addition to what I asked for -- images to display inline, style sheets, code to make buttons click themselves, that sort of thing. I can decide for myself if I want to get what they're recommending or not.

    All an ad blocker does is make intelligent decisions on how much of the extra stuff the computer should automatically request on my behalf.

    At any point, I or my computer can decide to stop asking for stuff, and they can decide to stop offering it up.

    We already know that companies have developed means to detect ad blockers; I'm sure we've all see the "Won't you please consider letting us spam you?" messages. They have everything they need to respond appropriately, just as we've already responded appropriately to their offers to spam us.

    The civilized response would be to detect an ad blocker and refuse to serve up content until some other agreement can be met -- either that the user consents to be spammed or pays a fee or whatever the two of them agree is reasonable.

    The uncivilized response is what got us in this mess: the advertisers are giving us a giant FUCK YOU finger in response to our clearly-stated rejection of being spammed at, and are hijacking our computers to spam us in our faces anyway.

    Fuck that shit. They want to be uncivilized about it, I've no reason to be civilized in return.

    b&

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday August 12 2015, @11:44PM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday August 12 2015, @11:44PM (#222000) Journal

    The civilized response would be to detect an ad blocker and refuse to serve up content until some other agreement can be met -- either that the user consents to be spammed or pays a fee or whatever the two of them agree is reasonable.

    Exactly. Some sites do this now. If you don't view one or more of the ads, they don't send the content.
    Some send the content anyway, or at least part of it.

    Lots of them are resorting to html5 pop-ups which it seems nobody adequately blocks.

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    • (Score: 2) by Nollij on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:34PM

      by Nollij (4559) on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:34PM (#222579)

      If you don't view one or more of the ads, they don't send the content.

      I've encountered those. I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 seconds trying to get the content, and I know I've never enabled ads to see the content. In fact, it's even convinced me that a number of well-known sites are simply not worth visiting anymore.