Internet users are increasingly installing ad blockers

    Advertising agencies are sounding the alarm : they are losing an audience online. More and more users are installing ad blockers and falling out of sight of advertisers. The diagram on the left shows the number of users who use an ad blocker. As you can see, since 2013 there has been a sharp increase in the popularity of these programs.

    In 2013-2014, the number of users of blockers has tripled: from 50 million to 150 million people, and there is a tendency for further growth. According to experts, at the moment the audience of “refuseniks” exceeds 200 million people.

    This trend threatens the traditional online publishing business model, which provides for the placement of free content in exchange for viewing ads.

    The Eyeo company, which releases the most popular Adblock Plus among similar programs, speaks of more than 400 million downloads of this extension to the browser.

    Until recently, advertising was blocked only on personal computers and laptops, but now such software is installed even on mobile devices, which are increasingly used for surfing the Web. This fact saddens advertisers even more.

    In previous years, ad blockers were considered the destiny of technically advanced users. They were not too easy to install and configure. But now they are installed in two clicks as extensions of Chrome or Firefox, and work fine right out of the box according to the prepared "black list".

    Websites that push aggressive ad formats such as videos, flash animations and pop-ups are pushing people to use such programs.

    Judging by the statistics, young users are most intolerant of such advertising. Wells Fargo Securities market research authors say that as these users grow older, the overall popularity of ad blockers will increase.

    Few media companies decide to publish figures of their losses from the fact that the audience cuts ads on sites. For example, the German media group ProSiebenSat.1 stated that in 2014 it suffered € 9.2 million in losses due to this. This is about a fifth of the company's revenue from online activities.

    Most affected are companies that work for a male audience with a technical background. Here, the popularity of ad blockers is maximum. For example, among Geektimes visitors, 93% of the audience use such programs .

    Publishers are trying to somehow respond to this situation. For example, they place advertisements not in the form of graphic banners, but in the form of advertising articles. Others try to influence the audience and talk about the dangers of blockers. For example, the website of the British newspaper Guardian displays the following message: “We noticed that you have installed a program to block ads. Perhaps you would like to support the Guardian in another way? ”

    Other sites do even harder. For example, the Hulu video site does not allow users who have “banner cutters” installed at all. In Germany, some media have sued Eyeo. The fact is that the program of this company doesn’t cut all the advertising, but does it selectively: it skips some banners if they are “not annoying” (in reality, if the advertiser made a certain amount of money into Eyeo's account). There is information that Eyeo has entered into such an agreement, including with Google.

    However, in two lawsuits, Eyeo was acquitted. The court decided that it has the right to conduct such business practices, as users are notified in advance of the presence of a “white list”. But even if Eyeo is sued, this will not stop other developers of ad blocking software. Many of these projects are created by the community and will probably continue to work.

    Advertisers are hoping for help from Apple and Google, which may prohibit the installation of blockers on mobile devices running under their operating systems. But again, any restrictions there can be overcome after rutting the device. You can install a third-party browser in which the blocking function is originally embedded. Recently, this one was released under the Adblock brand .

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