“100 million users, 100 million thank-yous.” On Monday, Adblock Plus announced that it now has more than 100 million active users. More accurately, that’s 100 million active installations. A user who has downloaded Adblock Plus to more than one device will be counted once for each installation. This is double the number of users reported by Adblock Plus at the beginning of the year, reports MediaPost.
“These are our latest numbers, which we’ve been working for months on getting more accurate without breaking our strict privacy policy. Harder than it sounds … Happily, we’ve got some stupid smart data scientists who’ve figured out a way to get an accurate estimation,” said Ben Williams for Adblock Plus in the announcement.
“While user numbers in countries where ad blocking is fairly well-known, like Germany and France, are pretty stable, in countries like the US and UK people are really coming on to the benefits of taking back control of their online experience,” Williams added.
Adblock Plus is an open source, free extension that allows web users to block annoying ads, disable tracking and block domains that are known to spread malware. It is available for Android, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explore, Maxthon, Opera, Safari and Yandex.
The tool allows users to block sites, ads, etc. through user-defined rules and filters. Users can also white-list sites they don’t want to block ads from or that use “acceptable ads” as defined through the Acceptable Ads initiative and manifesto.
Insider Take:
While the growing popularity of its product is great for Adblock Plus, it is bad news for subscription companies and others who rely on digital advertising revenue as an income source. In fact, as we reported last year, ad blocking cost $21.8 billion in 2015, and that figure is expected to nearly double to $41.4 billion in 2016!
Unfortunately, the two sides of the equation – consumers who hate annoying ads and don’t want to be tracked online, and advertisers and businesses who are losing ad revenue and potential subscribers – have not found any middle ground. Adblock Plus says it is trying through its Acceptable Ads initiative which encourages companies to follow its criteria to produce acceptable ads. IAB is also trying to find an acceptable solution for publishers by recommending its DEAL approach for handling ad blockers.
The bottom line: this problem is not going away. Ad blocker usage is rising, and ad revenue is dropping. To find a reasonable solution, the two sides have to look at the real issues and figure out how to meet their readers and customers’ needs without sacrificing privacy, content quality or user experience. We hope they find that solution sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, publishers and other subscription companies can employ IAB’s DEAL approach to determine how to best handle their situation: Detect, Explain, Ask and Lift or Limit.
