Are ad-blockers a blessing or a curse?
Online ad-blockers aren’t new. They’ve been going for about 15 years now.
There are a range of plug-ins and programmes you can use to strip out ads from your online experience.
Their detractors – and they are many – are quick to point out they only make up about 6 per cent of total global web users. But they do seem to be on the rise, even before this latest move by the gang from Cupertino.
Ad-blockers frighten the bejeepers out of anyone in the advertising and free content publishing business, because they threaten to strangle their main income stream – paid display advertising.
According to a 2014 study by Page Fair/Adobe, ad-blocker use is growing at 117 per cent a year and should pass 200 million users this year (and that was before the latest move by Apple).
However, in some countries their use is a lot heavier. Poland, Sweden, Denmark and Greece are the biggest users with 24 per cent of their online populations using ad-blocking software.
They appear to more popular among young males, with 54 per cent of those surveyed saying they employed them. They also seem common among Android users, with 30 per cent of them saying they used ad-blockers in a recent survey by Global Web Index.
It’s not hard to see why they are popular, as they do two useful things.
First they mean you don’t need to put up with interruptions when you are consuming content – and if you’ve ever been forced to sit through eye-blaster treatments you’ll know how painful this can be.
Second, they can seriously improve the speed of your browser. A recent review of browsing speeds by French online pundit Frederic Filloux found that ad-blockers could reduce page loading speeds of mainstream news websites by up to 80 per cent.
At first blush then, the continual growth of ad-blockers seem a pretty handy idea and means you are less likely to be chased by display network advertisements as you traverse the likes of Google and Facebook.
And frankly when you look at the revenues of these web giants you figure they can afford to take a bit of a haircut, especially when you look at the almost nonexistent tax they pay in countries like New Zealand.
However, it’s also likely to sock punters in the chops for the likes of free stuff like Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo and Wordpress, or free content news websites like BBC Online and Stuff.
The largely free internet that people currently enjoy cannot continue to exist if ad-blockers continue to grow at their current rates.
These providers are fighting back through a variety of means including cash settlements (as Google did with the German owners of AdblockPlus), employing adblocking diverters, introducing less porous paywalls and the increased use of content marketing (which bypasses adblockers). It’s an interesting battle line. On the one side is the free internet establishment who provide functionality and content in exchange for revenue from the sale of ads and user data.
On the other is a model that keeps the free internet benefit but strips out the means of generating revenue.
After the interstate network threatened main-street businesses in the United State, those businesses moved to purpose-built strip malls and destination shopping to ensure they had continued visibility to customers. It’ll be interesting to see if the providers of a free internet find a similar solution.