Actually, ad blocking’s not such a threat
There's much hype. It's just hype. A look at the numbers.
October 8, 2015
Over the past few weeks there’s been a huge hullabaloo over ad blocking.
Here’s the problem: While everyone seems very worried about ad blocking, no one seems to know how big a threat it is.
None of these discussions cite actual data about how many people are blocking ads.
If we’re going to have this debate, we should have some facts to back it up.
So Media Life set out to find all we could about ad blocking to determine whether it’s actually the big threat it’s being made out to be.
Our conclusion?
The threat of ad blocking is being overblown, at least for now and especially online.
While there are many people blocking ads, both online and on television, it’s nowhere near a critical mass. The majority of Americans are still content to sit through TV ads and to maneuver around layers of online ads if need be to access the content they want.
As one digital ad firm manager told eMarketer, ““At this point, it’s not having a noticeable impact on our business.”
Indeed, eMarketer cites a June 2015 Strata study that found 91 percent of ad agency professional considered ad blocking either not a concern or only somewhat of a concern.
But we’ll let you make up your mind for yourself about the threat. Here’s a sampling of the data we collected in our search:
Online ad blocking
Just 0.1 percent of all page views in the United States are being blocked. (Source: eMarketer)
Worldwide, 4.9 percent of internet users employed ad blockers as of second quarter of last year. (Source: PageFair and Adobe)
Fifty-three percent of U.S. internet users do not use ad blockers.
Forty-one percent of U.S. internet users have ad blocking software on their desktop or laptop.
Eleven percent of mobile phone users and 7 percent of tablet users have ad blockers. (Source: Reuters Digital News Report, 2015)
But worldwide the U.S, ranks at the very bottom for mobile ads that are actually blocked, at 0.1 percent. (Source: comScore and Sourcepoint)
Since the new Apple iOS allowing ad blocking was released last month, 600,000 ad blocking apps have been downloaded from the Apple store. There are 94 million iPhones in use in the United States. (Source: Apple, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners)
TV ad blocking/skipping
For TV, ad zapping appears to vary widely by the show, at least according to numbers from TiVo.
For instance, TiVo viewers watched 83 percent of the ads on HGTV’s “Love It or List It” last year. But they skipped 73 percent of the ads on AMC’s “Mad Men” and 66 percent of ads on “The Walking Dead.” (Source: TiVo)
But the percentage of all DVR viewers fast-forwarding through broadcast ads actually declined from 58.8 in 2007-’08 to 46.7 percent in 2011-’12. (Source: ThinkProgress)
And further, half of Nielsen homes don’t have DVRs and are not able to skip ads watching TV shows live.
Forty-nine percent of video-on-demand viewers fast-forward through commercials when that option is available. (Source: Hub)
Tags: ad blockers, ad blocking, how many ads are blocked, how many people use ad blockers, new media, research
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