Use of Ad-Blocking Software Rises by 30% Worldwide (+my take on that data)

Every year, Irish anti-adblock startup PageFair publishes it "Ad Blocking Report".

To understand PageFair's interest here, it's important to understand that their company purpose is to serve ads "that adblock software is unable to circumvent". To many, including me, this is against users' interests, and also possibly illegal. Also, it's notably different to Adblock Plus' Acceptable Ads philosophy, which gives every user a choice to accept some non-intrusive ads or not, and also give him or her a choice on which web site.

PageFair thus has a vested interest to exaggerate the issue, and drum up new business to their anti-user solution of serving ads that adblock software is unable to circumvent. And I do feel they have somewhat achieved that goal, because the headline "30% more ad block users" sounds great, though it doesn't really do the data justice. The majority of new adblock users originate from alternative mobile browser in India, China and Southeast Asia, and are also rather casual users, who once in a while use one of the browsers with built-in adblock. Thus, while the number of world-wide adblock users has been growing a lot, the economic impact (measured as % of adblocked traffic) isn't growing at the same rate. Neither world-wide, but let alone in Europe and the US, which are commercially most relevant markets (highest RPM).

Apart from this criticism, PageFair has done a good job collecting and publishing the data, for which they deserve credit, and they have also come to some interesting conclusions:

• 77% of adblock users surveyed indicated that they found some ad format to be permissible. This data is in line with the big Adblock Plus / Hubspot survey.
• Adblock users in the US are 1.5x as likely to have a bachelor’s degree than the average American adult, increasing to 3x as likely among 18-24 year olds. In other words: Adblock users are among the most sought after and profitable demographic.
• Adblock walls are ineffective at motivating most adblock users to disable their adblock software, even temporarily. 74% of users simply leave websites when they encounter such a wall. So, in other words: Don't build that wall!

Here's the full N.Y. Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/technology/ad-blocking-internet.html

And here's the full PageFair study:

https://pagefair.com/downloads/2017/01/PageFair-2017-Adblock-Report.pdf