Ad-blocking tools are continuing to impact the ability of news publishers to monetise their traffic, according to new data shared with Press Gazette.
Although the number of internet users deploying ad-blockers has gone down in recent years.
One expert told Press Gazette that although most publishers are aware of the problems posed by ad-blockers, “a lot of them do not understand the scope and size of the problem”.
This means there is a large amount of unmeasured and therefore unmonetised audience falling by the wayside.
The “adblockalypse” was widely declared in 2015 when Apple introduced the ability to install ad-blocking software on Safari, its default mobile browser, on iPhones.
Fifteen years on, ad-blockers have not destroyed the advertising industry in the dramatic way that the term some feared, but they are continuing to get more sophisticated.
One in five (21%) internet users across almost 60 countries worldwide now regularly use an ad-blocker while a further one in ten use them occasionally, according to Q2 2024 data shared with Press Gazette by consumer research firm GWI. The data is from its flagship survey data set GWI Core with a sample size of 239,225.
However, the number of regular ad-blocker users has gone down by 15% since 2021.
GWI consumer and tech analyst Chris Beer told Press Gazette there “could be a few different reasons for this. Websites like Youtube have taken a much stronger stance against ad-blocking technology and this might have dissuaded some from using the tools.
“But the last few years have also seen the continuing trend of more consumers saying their smartphone is their most-used device, not their PC. And as ad-blockers are relatively harder to install on mobile, this ongoing trend in device usage may be a key factor.”
Men are more likely to use ad-blockers than women (24% versus 29%) while 25 to 34-year-olds were the most likely age group (23%) and the lowest was the oldest age group covered, 55 to 64-year-olds (19%).
Beer said: “Ad-blockers are used most by young men with a high level of education – which is the audience usually most comfortable with picking up new technology.”
The UK usage level according to GWI was 20% while the US was on 23%.
Beer continued: "There are a few hotspots around the world where ad-blocking is particularly popular. One is central Europe (countries like Austria, Hungary, and Germany) where there is a historic distrust and suspicion of data collection. These countries also rank highly in our research for deleting cookies, preferring to browse anonymously, and worrying about government tracking.
"South East Asia (especially China) is another area with above-average rates of ad-blocking. This may be due to browsing habits – internet access is primarily through smartphones rather than PCs, which are typically easier to use ad-blockers on. But it may also be down to a regional preference for private browsing, as we also see Southeast Asian countries rank highly for that behaviour."
The most popular reason given for using ad-blockers globally was that there are too many ads (64%) followed by ads "get in the way" (55%) and for privacy protection (41%).
Beer said: "The main reason ads are blocked is because users feel there are too many of them, and this is true in almost every country in the world. Ad-blockers allow users to take control of what can sometimes be an overwhelming experience – in a one-off survey we ran in October 2023, 'excessive', 'intrusive' and 'distracting' were some of the most common terms used to describe ads on websites."
Dustin Cha, the co-founder of a new ad-blocking solution for publishers called Ad-Shield, told Press Gazette users have in recent years increasingly pursued more extreme ad-blockers because the softer ones "are not effective... Obviously there are hosts of other stuff including privacy, but I think it's very simplistic: because these ad-blockers are not working."
This is because, he said, of services which offer ad-blocking to consumers on the front end yet go to publishers and "ask them if you give me some money we will whitelist your website and basically serve ads to users of their own ad blocker". As a result, he added, users got fed up of seeing adverts despite signing up for ad-blocking services and found rivals that lean more towards users.
Cha, whose company Ad-Shield is now one of those enabling sites to show ads even to ad-blocker users, has begun working with more than 100 publishers around the world.
He said: "Most publishers are aware of the problem. They are aware that a certain percentage of their traffic is basically going unaddressed and unmonetised... But a lot of them do not understand the scope and size of the problem."
He continued: "Some of the publishers that we talk to, including some of the bigger, larger, premium publishers, they sometimes even write it off. They say, hey, like, we understand that there is a problem, but we think that this is just such a small problem. It's only a single digit percentage. When we actually go in and measure it, it's a substantial amount of traffic."
Ad-Shield estimates that more than 700 million website users globally are currently unmeasured by publishers' analytics solutions because they are using one of hundreds of brutal ad-blockers, with an average of between 14% to 21% of a publisher's audience not getting reported. It says this goes up for publishers with a younger or more tech-savvy audience to around 24% to 32%.
One tech publisher that recently signed up to Ad-Shield discovered their dark traffic made up 55% of total traffic, and their measured page views doubled overnight, Press Gazette has been told.
Cha gave the "extreme" example of a German IT website for which 65% of traffic was using ad-blockers. "Obviously it's more of a dramatic case, but typically we're seeing anywhere between 15 to 30% ad-block ratio on our website, and those traffic is going even not measured," he said, calling this "dark traffic".
"Some brutal ad blockers even block the measurement scripts, which means that websites, if they thought that they had, like, ten million page views every month, they're not measuring two to three million page views. They think that it's just not existing, but it's real traffic..."
The brutal versions, he added, can block popular measurement solutions such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics as well as pop-ups that ask people to turn off ad-blockers on that website and messages with subscription offers.
Ad-Shield's business model is based on revenue sharing with publishers who are able to see and therefore monetise traffic that they are currently missing. "This is going to be purely incremental additional revenue for the publishers because they were basically making $0 out of the ad-blocked traffic," Cha said.
"We're coming in and we're what we're doing, essentially, we're creating net new supply. We're basically creating net new land for them where they can monetise..."
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