Ad Blockers Could Cost the Industry Billions in 2015

Quite a few years ago, when I was installing an ad-blocker for my browser, I was thinking that advertisers must be losing a lot of money because of this relatively simple extension. It seems that my assumption was correct because ad-blockers might end up costing as much as $21.8 billion globally in lost advertising revenue, and that’s just for 2015. These numbers come from a study conducted by Adobe and PageFair named “The cost of ad blocking”. The study suggests that almost 200 million monthly internet users are using ad-blocking extensions, and it looks like the sites that are the most affected by the blocks are those who target “young, technically savvy, or more male audiences.”

When it comes to regional specifics, Europe leads the ad-blocking charge with 77 million monthly users, while the US is quite a bit behind at 45 million. In Europe, Greece has the highest rate of ad-block usage, as 36.7% of its internet users are using these extensions. Even though ads are currently being stopped mostly on desktops and laptops, they are slowly being blocked on mobile devices as well, especially in Asia. As Apple is looking to provide ad blocking support with its Safari mobile browser for iOS9, this trend is likely to increase fast.

The co-founder and chief executive of PageFair, Sean Blanchfield, stated the following:

“It is tragic that ad block users are inadvertently inflicting multi-billion dollar losses on the very websites they most enjoy. With ad blocking going mobile, there’s an eminent threat that the business model that has supported the open web for two decades is going to collapse.”

Thank you TechSpot for providing us with this information.