Is Ad Blocking a Major Concern for Advertisers?

Ad blocking may be a foreign term for many internet users, but that may change in the near future. There are many different kinds of software that allow customers to keep advertisements from appearing during their internet experience. With this software, an internet user’s experience has no pop-up, video ads, banners, or display ads of any kind.

This might sound peachy keen from a user standpoint, however advertisers might not feel the same way. The University of Oxford did a study that shows 41% of PC users and 11% of mobile users in the United States use ad blocking software regularly.

PageFair/Adobe did another study that looked at a more international scale. In Europe the amount of users using ad blocking software varies from 8.9% in Slovakia all the way to 37.5% in Greece.

Surprisingly enough, advertisers aren’t too concerned with this new ad blocking software. The following graph from eMarketer shows data collected from a survey by Strata that found that only 9% of advertisers say they have a major concern.

While the usage of ad blocking may be on the rise, it is comforting to know that your everyday user is not the prime culprit in this activity. PageFair/Adobe concludes that gaming and technology are amongst the top activities for which ad blocking is used. This tells advertisers that it is the more tech savvy user taking advantage of ad blocking and not your everyday user. At the bottom of the list sits shopping and search engines where few users utilize ad block. This is good news for advertisers as those are normally the targeted audience for advertisements.

Although ad blocking is on the rise, advertisers see no threat to getting their message across… yet.