The percentage of visitors with an ad blocker depends on your site's audience. Outside of computer geeks and gamers, almost no one uses ad blockers. I wouldn't buy into the hype that the whole world is installing ad blockers.
We're seeing 30-50% of visitors blocking Google Analytics client side tracking at 80000hours.org. Target audience is university educated 18-30 year olds, ~100K unique visitors / month.
The folks at Segment.io warn their users to expect ~20%, with the caveat that blocking rates vary wildly between demographics [1].
I encourage friends and family to install ad blockers. I've been asked numerous times over the years to look at a computer that has either died or just isn't working well anymore. I always offer to install an adblocker after the actual problem is addressed and about everyone leaves with an adblocker.
Its not technically difficult at all. It takes a few clicks to install and one click to disable on the minority of sites that don't work with ad blockers.
You are right, but the number of ad-block users is significant now -- around 20% (accd. to the same PageFair report).
I have also personally seen around 30% users use ad-blockers, for a site with around 100,000 visitors a day. However, most of the audience for that site is people in twenties, so it's not surprising to see higher than average ad-blocker usage.
Reports are from 20-30% of desktop and mobile users make use of some sort of adblocker/privacy tool. That is a very large set of users, and in some industries and domains the numbers go much higher.
Purely for self-protection/anti-aggravation I absolutely recommend it to every casual user I advise.
Why not. Try sharing a link to ublock origin on facebook with text to the effect that installing the add on from the link will remove 90% of the annoying clutter from the web, make everything load faster, and protect their computers from malware.
Realize that the link in either the chrome or firefox case will be to the official addon site and in the mind of the user safe doubly so since it came from someone trusted.
What percentage of people who see it will spend the 3 clicks to install it?
* Note I know you have no incentive to actually do so its hypothetical many people are encouraging non techies to do so and have been doing so for a very long time the percentage that are aware of adblocking is increasing.
Is there any data on the number of people using ad blockers? I've personally seen a massive increase in the number of non-techy friends using them. A lot of people for example stream sports (illegally) and those sites are barely functional without a blocker.
I don't have those numbers. I know there have been some publications lately that suggest there is an increase, which make sense since I doubt the number would decrease, but like browser usage stats, those numbers are heavily dependent on the audience they were collected from.
My non-technical friends have never mentioned ads to me before in the context of the web. I doubt that means they appreciate ads on sites but I don't think it occurs to them that they need to find a way to remove them. I think they appreciate that Hulu lets you pay to remove them, or that Netflix doesn't have ads, but I never hear "this website sucks because of ads." They just assume it's the way of things.
Sometime ago I read an interesting interview[1] with the Economist deputy editor, Tom Standange, saying things like:
> The other thing about ads is that 41 percent of millennials are using ad block. My daughter has ad block and she goes around infecting every machine she gets to. She puts it on everything.
> But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads.
Digital privacy is an undeniable rising trend. Just stating the vast majority of people are not using adblock is, at minimum, shortsighted.
> But the other thing is that she lives in incognito mode. She’s a total nightmare for advertisers, because she’s not leaving any cookies and she’s not seeing any ads.
Do you have a source for this? Your statement doesn't carry any weight if you can't back it up. Anecdotally, I have seen a rise in non-tech-savvy people using ad blockers, but I'd be interested to see some hard data.
