Google's AdBlockPlus deal will save them nearly $1bn per year | Hacker News Reader

Google's AdBlockPlus deal will save them nearly $1bn per year

blog.pagefair.com

Does anyone have any good data on the prevalence of ad blocking? The headline number in this article ($887 million) is a pure guess, based on an estimate of 10% of users using ad blocking. They provide absolutely no evidence or reasoning behind this guess. End result: All of their attention-grabbing numbers are pure conjecture and speculation.

There must be users on here who run some high volume sites who can share what % of ads are blocked, surely?

(edit: the linked http://blog.pagefair.com/2013/destructoid-not-alone/ does give more background into some sample sites and adblocking %s, but more numbers and real world data would be good)

We're using 10% as a very conservative estimate actually. We've been measuring adblock data for 9 months now across several hundred sites, many of which are very large. The current average blockrate across all these publishers is 26.1%. These are the guys who are so acutely affected that they signed up to us in the first place, but it gives you a good idea.

A fair estimate of a minimum value is the block rate on sites that are non-techie, e.g., lifestyle (12% blockrate) and news (16% blockrate).

We'll be doing another post soon revealing all these numbers and our methodology in collecting them in detail.

Good point about the rate varying a lot based on the audience - I imagine that tech sites have it worst for blocking rates.

I wonder how the rates vary for tablet/mobile viewing? I'd guess fewer users manage to block ads on these devices?

Oh, and blocking rates on mobile/tablet is very low, probably consisting of ISP-level adblocking. That will shortly change though - the adblock community is hard at work creating mobile versions.

The rate is actually highest on gaming-related sites. I guess that audience is usually sufficiently technical, and is also habitually bombarded with aggressive advertising.

Have any of your customers used the metrics they gleaned to size up an ad-blocker white-listing offer themselves?

Not so far as we are aware. Not many sites have gone down the whitelisting route, for the kind of reasons discussed in the post above. That said, lots of our customers are discovering just how badly they are affected. Some sites have more than 64% of their visitors blocking their ads, and are facing extinction.

The metrics you provide are certainly useful in putting low ad-revenue in some context for a business.

The first paragraph of the "recent study" you linked.

"In a poll commissioned by the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), 92 percent of 1,000 Americans surveyed agreed that free news, weather, email, blogs and video content was either somewhat or extremely important to the overall value of the Internet."

What kind of category is "somewhat or extremely important" and how is 1000 people of undisclosed circumstances (other than being American) representative of people that use the internet?

The study that is linked from "the majority are not bothered by the static, non-intrusive ads" asks users of Mechanical Turk to look at an ad and rate it on its "annoyingness". Each user was paid 25 cents flat, and 2 cents per ad to a 172 ad maximum - so there's a $3.75 incentive maximum on completing the test will ratings on everything.

How annoying is any ad that you are being paid to stare at? That's missing the point completely.

I don't buy this sentiment that ad-blocking will be the end of the internet. Continued innovation on payment models, and content worth paying for is what we really need.

Content worth paying is what we really need? Then why we don't have it currently? As far as I know, nothing stop that kind of content to appear...

However blocking ad stop good free content to appear (maybe not much, but it still affected, unlike the type of content you want).

> “Less than 10 percent of the people polled would prefer an ad-free Internet where users paid to access blogs, entertainment sites, videos and social media sites, while 75 percent surveyed said they prefer the existing Internet model where most content is free, but includes ads.” – Amy Gesenhues – Marketing Land

Marketer says people prefer marketing?

Makes you wonder how much AdBlockPlus is making from their deal to unblock them. I would have asked for at least $200 million per year. It's amazing that this isn't considered extortion, but since it's not, I think it would make sense for some of the less popular ad blockers to join together and offer a similar deal.

I believe this is what you find under the definition of "selling out" in a dictionary.

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