Around one fourth browsers have ad-blocking tools, which reduce revenue of free-content websites which mainly depend on advertisements as income, an Irish company said last week.
“It’s a vicious cycle. Ads are becoming more aggressive to capture eyeballs,” said Neil O’Connor, CEO of PageFair, a Dublin-based company, “but that forces more people to install ad-blocking software. It’s a lose-lose situation.”
However, without the revenue ads generate, most websites cannot sustain operations. Magazine sites and most news sites rely on advertising for revenue.
PageFair found something from its survey. “We started this because we were a publisher ourselves,” said O’Connor. “We wanted to know how many of our users were dropping out by installing ad blockers, and thought it was maybe as high as 10 percent. But we found that 30 percent were blocking our ads. That was shocking to us.”
22.7% of the users on average who browsed to the several hundred sites monitored by PageFair since September 2012 used an ad blocker.
AdBlock Plus, which is available for add-blocking for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer, is the famous one. O’Connor finds that, Firefox users block ads more than other browsers users, and the percentage is 37 percent. Chrome took second place with a 30 percent blocking rate. IE’s rate was minimal, less than 1 percent.
Ad blocking is becoming more popular, O’Connor found. So what’s the answer for sites struggling to deal with ad blocking?
“One way is to remove the most disturbed and annoying ads—especially those distracting animations and sounds—and rely on more discrete text-based ads, “said O’Connor. Some websites include Google begin to work with ad blocker makers rather than fight the tide.
Browsers’ ad-blocking threaten free sites, researchers say
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