Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @10:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2015, @10:32PM (#221965)

    That car analogy would work better if you took the car for a test drive then didn't buy it. There is some cost to letting you have a test drive, just like their is some cost to serving up content on a website. And in both cases, without some sort of contract/agreement, you don't owe them anything just because you took a car for a test drive or viewed content on some website.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @02:20AM (#222078)

    That car analogy would work better if you took the car for a test drive then didn't buy it.

    No, because then you're taking a physical object. Their logic is literally 'We didn't gain as much as we wanted to; therefore, we actually lost something.' Lack of gain != losing something.

    This is just people controlling what they see and connect to on their own equipment, just like the people who control the website can design their website however they see fit.

    There is some cost to letting you have a test drive, just like their is some cost to serving up content on a website.

    If they're so worried about the cost, I suggest they not host servers on the open web and then act surprised when people connect and use their own private property in a way that they see fit.