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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: 2) by monster on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:36AM

    by monster (1260) on Thursday August 13 2015, @07:36AM (#222169) Journal

    True enough, but there's another side to the story: Brand value.

    Brand value is what allows Kellog to charge more than the competition for the same product and still sell its products. But getting your brand to be instantly recognized means investing in brand-promoting activities, and one of them is ads. Ads that make people believe that Kellog's products are safe, healthy or even give an "experience", or at least more than the competition, even if they aren't.

    Also, once brand value appears, you no longer charge more because you are spending the difference in ads, you charge more because you can.

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