Ad blockers responsible for £14bn of lost revenue

The global economic impact of ad blocking software is predicted to reach more than £14bn by the end of the year, and would have nearly doubled to £26.7bn by the end of 2016, according to a report by PageFair and Adobe.

In the UK, PageFair and Adobe counted an average of 12 million monthly active users of ad blockers in the second quarter of 2015. They said that year-on-year, the number of people who use ad blocking software has increased by 82 per cent.

The report, titled The cost of ad blocking, found that worldwide use of ad blockers increased by 41 per cent on last year, and that there are 198 million monthly users of the main browser extension that block ads.

It said that sites most visited by “young, technically savvy, or more male audiences” were most affected by ad blockers.

PageFair and Adobe described Google Chrome as a “main driver” of ad blocking growth, given the ease of installing ad blocking extensions onto the browser. They added that while mobile is not yet a threat, it will eventually facilitate an increase in future ad blocking, as ad blocking apps can be easily installed on Android devices.

Sean Blanchfield, PageFair’s co-founder and chief executive, said: “It is tragic that ad block users are inadvertently inflicting multi-billion dollar losses on the very websites they most enjoy.

“With ad blocking going mobile, there’s an eminent threat that the business model that has supported the open web for two decades is going to collapse.”