Report: 32 percent of global page views now impacted by ad blocking

While some in the industry are alarmed by ad blocking others dismiss it as overblown, it continues to grow. The latest evidence comes from Blockmetry, a company started by former Googler Pierre Far.

Far told me last week that he became fascinated by content (ad and analytics) blocking during his last couple of years at Google. His new company, Blockmetry, tracks the percentage of page views blocked rather than the number of users adopting ad blocking. This metric, says Far, better reflects “ad blocking’s real impact on websites.”

Blockmetry releases a periodic “weather report,” showing the ad and analytics blocking percentages by region and country. These percentages are measured on sites using Blockmetry code. Blockmetry tracks content blocking on websites across devices but not in smartphone and tablet apps.

Worldwide ad blocking (page views) now stands at 32.4 percent, while analytics blocking is 5.2 percent. This means that 32 percent of all page views Blockmetry is monitoring globally witness ad blocking. That’s up from 28.5 percent in May. However analytics blocking has not grown as much; it was 5.1 percent in May.

Far told me that Poland and Norway now are seeing 50 percent of page views subjected to ad blocking. Poland was at 45.5 percent in May. In the US, ad blocking affects 31.5 percent of measured pages and analytics blocking impacts 5 percent. That’s up from 27.8 percent and 4.6 percent respectively.

In Europe, the UK, France and Germany saw an average of 33 percent of page views affected by ad blocking in May. In a sign of some good news for the industry, the numbers were basically flat for most of the EU5 in August. However ad blocked page views were up in Germany. The region with the highest percentage of ad blocked page views is South Asia at 44.2 percent, up from 39.1 percent in May.

Mobile devices see less traffic/page views than the desktop but ad blocking rates that are much higher, roughly 3x higher. According to Far’s analysis the following is the global traffic mix for page views:

• Mobile: 30.9 percent
• Desktop: 59.6 percent
• Tablet: 9.5 percent

The following is the ad-blocking rate by device type:

• Mobile: 62.9 percent
• Desktop: 21 percent
• Tablet: 4.4 percent

What this means is that of the mobile segment (30.9 percent), 62.9 of those page views were impacted by ad blocking. The ad blocking percentages coming from the iPhone and Android devices are substantially the same, according to Far’s data.

Far observed, however, that while ad blocking on the desktop is much lower as a percentage of overall page views, the Opera browser is an exception: “43.3 percent of Opera desktop page views block ads, the highest desktop sub-type by a huge margin.” He sees that growing as more Opera desktop users upgrade.