Ad Blocks, programs and apps used to stop ads from appearing on the internet, have been a problem for digital marketing since its birth and now it looks like it’s growing to become the normal for the general public without any intention of slowing down. This time the UK is the one that reveals big growth in the use of Ad Blocks.
First, it stabilizes
The user growth rate of Ad Block in the UK has been stabilizing along the year and it is much lower than countries of the american continent. It’s estimated that in this year 22% of the population of Great Britain will be using some kind of ad blocking compared to 28.7% in France, 32.0% in Germany and 25.2% in the US. Apparently, this growth will continue to diminish until it reaches one digit numbers for the first time ever.
Growth can be predicted
The growth rate of this apps is predictable demographically, most of the users are young men, and while the blocking growth is faster on mobile, it will never reach the growth percentage that laptops and desktops have, 38% vs 88.9%, although we should remember that the report only refers to using applications or browser extensions to block ads while there are other ways to “block” them like ignoring them as they appear or putting down your smartphone as the ad comes to the screen or like some people do to the videos on Facebook Watch, when the ad comes interrupting the transmission, they just go to the next video before even catching a glimpse of the ad.
A hit to marketing
In reality the wider problem is for pages like Facebook, Twitter or any other page that sells ads and positioning since that is the primary source of their revenue. Even though this is just one of many paths for digital marketing, it is worthy of our attention. According to a study conducted in March 2018 by Integral Ad Science reports that 49% of publishers in the United Kingdom say that ad blocking represents a growing threat to the industry while only a 32.2% of marketers claim to be worried about this. This makes organic content all the more important because it’s obvious that users are constantly looking for ways to avoid the intrusion of publicity on their daily activities while real, engaging content make a much better impact on the users nowaday.
Sources
www.emarketer.com
www.businessinsider.com