Are ad blockers biggest threat to digital advertising today?

Key highlights:

• More than 600 million devices are now blocking ads worldwide
• An average ad block use or install rate of 16% was seen in early 2017
• Mobile devices block ads the most
• Non-skippable video ads and auto-play ads most disliked

While digital advertising has been growing, so has ad blocking too. According to a recent GroupM report an average ad block use or install rate of 16% was seen in early 2017. Even in India it is said that the use of ad blockers have increased.

“India observes that popular Android browsers like UC (Alibaba) and Opera often have ad block enabled as the default, but most phones have multiple browsers which users switch between,” said the GroupM report.

Source: PageFair 2017 Global Ad Block Report

More than 600 million devices are now blocking ads worldwide, according to a PageFair report. Ad blocking usage grew by 108 million to 380 million mobile devices and by 34 million to 236 million active desktops from December 2015 to December 2016.

Source: PageFair 2017 Global Ad Block Report

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It says that the major concern for ad blockers has been in Asia, Turkey and South Africa where browsing online has been more dominant on mobile devices. This is as many of the mobile phone web browsers come automatically fitted with ad blockers.

“It is Germany, where blocking is high, which points out that mobile growth stimulates the ad blocking industry,” it said. It further said that Canada and Italy repeat the familiar theme that younger males block ads the most, with Hong Kong specifying their intolerance of interruptions to game-play.

Even Japan, which is generally tolerant to advertising, this year saw three of its leading telecom players DoCoMo, SoftBank and KDDI launch device-embedded with ad blocking in response to the lagging performance and impaired content experience, with concerns about data.

Source: PageFair 2017 Global Ad Block Report

These developments in all these countries point out the growing feeling among consumers as to the interference of advertising in their lives.

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There are two main reasons for consumers to install ad blocking software, ie virus or malware concerns and interruptive ad formats. According to the PageFair report, 30% people chose to install ad blockers due to concerns of virus or malware and 29% felt that the ads were interruptive.

Source: PageFair 2017 Global Ad Block Report

While static banner ads are the most preferred, skippable video ads followed closely. However, the most disliked ads are non-skippable video ads and auto-play ads, said the report.

The best strategy to tackle ad blocking is to go for the cause and not the symptoms of blocking.

For instance, the report says that in Hong Kong brands have reacted more positively and have now increased their expertise in videos on social media and are more aware of the importance of quality content to discourage ad blocking.

However, in Indonesia it is reported that the main publishers have struck deals with the UC browser to block the ad blockers.