Rapid growth of ad blocking is costing the ad industry £14bn in lost ad revenue 2015 alone
It seems we’ve had it up to here with internet advertising – and it’s costing the industry billions in lost ad revenue.
Ad block usage is shooting up in the UK, growing by 82 per cent in the last year alone, outstripping an already very strong global growth as ad blockers are up globally by 41 per cent since 2014.
Ad blockers, or the apps and browser extensions that prevent advertising from appearing on web pages you read, now have 198m users worldwide, and 12m users in the UK alone, according to a report by Pagefair and Adobe.
Pagefair’s chief executive Sean Blanchfield commented that the results were “tragic”:
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.
According to the report, ad blockers have caused a loss of $21.8bn (£14bn) in ad revenues in 2015. The loss is expected to double to $41.4bn next year, as ad blocking begins to leave desktop computing and spread to mobile as well.