Ad blocking ‘costs’ websites $22 billion

According to a recent report from PageFair and Adobe (via Business Insider), it has been revealed that ad blockers have seen an increase of 41% in installations in the past year, which also means that there are plenty of ad companies who are potentially losing out on views.

The pair estimate that $5.8bn was in lost revenue in 2014 with the amount projected to reach $10.7bn this year and $20.3bn in 2016. The study, by software group Adobe and Ireland-based consultancy PageFair, found that the number of Internet users employing ad-blocking software has jumped 41 percent in the past 12 months to 198 million. The report said that while consumers have warmed to the idea of blocking online ads, they may not realize that the practice could hurt websites which rely on ad revenue. It expects this trend to accelerate globally in September when the ability to block ads is introduced to iOS.

Sean Blanchfield, the co-founder and chief executive at PageFair, said: “It is tragic that ad block users are inadvertently inflicting multi-billion dollar losses on the very websites they most enjoy“.

Forty-five million U.S. Web users, representing around 15% of Internet users in the country, now deploy an ad blocker.

“By working with PageFair, our goal with this research is to shed light on the effects of ad blocking so the industry can develop better solutions for content publishers, advertisers and consumers alike”, said Campbell Foster, a director of product marketing at Adobe.

Mobile ad blocking is already going mainstream in India and China, where two extremely popular browsers with a combined 600 million users come equipped with an ad block extension.

Websites in the gaming, social networking and education sectors are most likely to have their advertising disabled by visitors.

Ad blocking – using extensions, plug-ins or specially developed browsers to prevent ads from showing up on your screen – began as a phenomenon limited to tech-savvy early adopters.

Both firms agree that ad blocking now poses an existential threat for future of free content on the web.

The report says ad blocking, which has been concentrated on desktop browsers, is now spreading to mobile in Asia. The operating systems will feature a framework that makes it significantly easier for developers to create ad-blocking software, particularly on mobile.

“Makes sense – mobile is the next logical step for ad blocking”, Williams said.