Scalper1 News
Six months after Apple ( AAPL ) made ad-blocking possible on iOS mobile phones, eMarketer says that the trend is gaining steam. It could mean that companies including Alphabet ( GOOGL ) search unit Google, French ad firm Criteo ( CRTO ) and others relying on advertising to make money aren’t totally in the clear yet, though they’ve said that ad-blocking isn’t having any effect on their business. Worldwide, 38% of Internet users reported using an ad-blocking tool in Q4 2015, eMarketer notes, citing data from research group GlobalWebIndex. The rise comes after the percentage of people using ad-blocking tools had generally held steady earlier in the year — 28% in Q3 and Q2 and 27% in Q1, according to the survey. The U.S. showed the lowest ad-blocking adoption rate — 9% — of six large nations in North America and Europe, according a June survey by comScore and Sourcepoint. At 27%, France posted the highest ad-blocking rate, the survey said. Ad blockers serve to reduce the amount of bandwidth a user needs by cutting down the amount of content — seen and unseen — that a page has to load. They can also help with privacy by blocking programs that track users’ browsing habits — good for users, bad for advertisers who want to show their ads to people who are the most likely to buy their products. “It’s apparent that significant amounts of time are spent viewing ad-blocked video, and that’s the crux of the problem as far as publishers and advertisers are concerned,” the eMarketer report said. About 16% of the U.S. online population blocked Web ads during Q2 2015, according to a report from Adobe Systems ( ADBE ) and PageFair, an Ireland-based startup that measures ad-blocking costs for publishers. Ad blocking could could cost publishers $41.4 billion globally this year, up from $21.8 billion in 2015, according to that study. Last month, news site Wired became the latest publication to charge users who have installed ad-blocking tools. “We know that you come to our site primarily to read our content, but it’s important to be clear that advertising is how we keep WIRED going: paying the writers, editors, designers, engineers and all the other staff that works so hard to create the stories you read and watch here,” Wired told its readers in a post. On any given day, Wired added, “more than 20% of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads.” To snuff out any momentum, Wired said that people using ad blockers will not have full access to articles on its site and gave ad-block users two options — either agree to see ads while visiting Wired, or pay about $1 a week for an ad-free subscription. Media firms including NBC will not allow people using ad blockers to watch videos on their sites, while the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers are prodding people who use ad blockers to pay for subscriptions instead. Support for ad blocking built into Apple iOS 9 means that iPhone and iPad users can install ad-blocking services from Apple’s App Store. Those products give people the power to pull the plug on Web advertising that they deem annoying — everything from banner and pop-up ads to auto-play videos. Apple stock was up more than 1% in afternoon trading on the stock market today , near 103. Criteo was up 1%, while Adobe fell 1% and Alphabet was down a fraction. Image provided by Shutterstock . Scalper1 News
Scalper1 News