Ad Blocking will hurt Publishers

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I came across a very few interesting articles on the potential impact of ‘ad-blocking’ plugins on publishers revenue. The argument was the so many individuals were using ad blockers that it has become a real threat to the viability of publishers to eak out a few Euros from their digital offerings – considering that the revenues from print have being going south for the last few years.

Irish based start-up PageFair in their report on ad blocking in 2015 estimate that there were 181m active internet users with ad blockers on their browsers. This is a 41% increase in blocking usage in a year. This represents about 6% of the total active internet population as a whole but country by country statistics vary.

The cost to the industry was estimated to be $41B currently in “lost revenues” – or rather missed opportunities to see.

Across Europe we have a huge difference in the usage by country. Reason for that may vary from country to country and might include the execution and creative variations of ads by country. When surveyed those using blockers the main reason for availing of the technology as a misuse of personal data in ads to personalise the offering (50%). Ad quality was also a big factor with 40% putting the usage of blockers down to quality.

The Greeks were the biggest users with a massive 38% of active users using a blocker of some sort. Poland was second at 35%. Ireland came in the bottom half at 17% and Slovakia where only 9% used blockers were the lowest in Europe.

From a publisher perspective it’s yet another arrow to defend themselves from. If you’re not getting the money at the tills, then you have to get it digitally and blocking is a threat to that side of their livelihood.

City AM, the free business title in the UK came up with a novel idea when faced with ad blocking. If they detected it in a users browser, they would only serve up the first three lines of a story and would only show the complete article when the blocker was turned off explaining the commercial implications it had on their business.

ad blocking

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