Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/

by dotcoma • 2 years ago

77 68 2 years ago

theregister.com

dabacaba• 2 years ago

This link was already posted three times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39877496

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39849944

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39846010

leereeves• 2 years ago

My favorite part:

66 percent of experienced advertisers ... use ad blockers

fluidcruft• 2 years ago

Could make sense if they're trying to see what methods make it past blockers. I probably would do that if I were in that industry.

rchaud3• 2 years ago

It's normal for people at FB/IG to not allow their children to use those apps. This is the same principle. TV ad execs probably have TiVo at home.

BossHogg• 2 years ago

Favorite part and best part. When the large majority of advertisers block advertisements there's really no room to complain when anyone else does the same.

ramesh312• 2 years ago

This plus the third-party cookie apocalypse means advertisers are going to need to seriously reconsider the entire approach of personalization and targeting. For all of the billions and billions of dollars poured into ad-tech, I really don't buy that this stuff is any more effective than manually chosen or page contextual display ads. Maybe for juicing a few short term points on an A/B test, sure. But has anyone seriously verified that any of this stuff is effective versus control over the long term?

vundercind• 2 years ago

I suspect it’s very valuable for a small proportion of campaigns that very carefully use its features and are thoughtfully designed, and the same or worse than traditional advertising for the rest.

I further suspect a whole lot of the ones it’s very-good for are scams, or scam-adjacent.

cassianoleal• 2 years ago

Even for those campaigns it might be cheaper to cast a wider net using a non-personalised ad scheme.

wing-_-nuts• 2 years ago

the third-party cookie apocalypse

Expand?

rchaud3• 2 years ago

Most browsers now do not allow 3rd parties to set cookies when you visit a first-party site. By end of 2024, Google Chrome will block all 3rd party cookies completely.

https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/3pcd

rchaud3• 2 years ago

Cookies are as good as dead already, and have mostly been replaced with:

- native apps with device-level Mobile Advertising ID exposed

- login walls (e.g. Twitter)

- browser fingerprinting

ramesh312• 2 years ago

First party audiencing has indeed been used for a long time now. It works... to an extent. But it requires significant opt-in and will never replace what cross-site cookies could do. Same for fingerprinting.

withinboredom4• 2 years ago

Cookies are very much alive (still the best way to do CSRF protection). I think you mean 3rd party cookies?

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

The original report: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/privacy-report-advertisers-and....

Curiously, only "76% of experienced cybersecurity professionals and 72% of programmers also reported using an adblocker, compared to just 52% of Americans."

miohtama• 2 years ago

If you know how the sausage is made you don’t want to eat the sausage.

bhhaskin• 2 years ago

I don't use an ad blocker at work because I have had it affect my work and lose time trying to figure out why something isn't working right.

orev• 2 years ago

If you’re a developer that’s very important information, since if you deploy an app that breaks with ad blockers, it’s not going to work for 52% of users.

aaomidi3• 2 years ago

I was once a security engineer at Google. So many people really believed ad blocking is like, actual theft. Got into an argument about that with my manager once lol.

ffsm82• 2 years ago

So many people really believed ad blocking is like, actual theft.

If copyright infringement is considered theft, then AdBlock would've to be considered akin to theft too. They're inherently the same thing. You're consuming the content without providing the expected revenue to the owner.

From my perspective, neither can be considered theft. Which is why I use AdBlock, too. But if either is theft, then the other would've to be too.

You could very well argue that AdBlock is technically worse then copyright infringement, because you're still using the bandwidth of the provider. With "piracy" you're sharing the content through other avenues.

rokkitmensch• 2 years ago

So is the excess consumption of my CPU cycles with asinine JS.

blitzar• 2 years ago

Then google is stealing my time, by showing me ads - I am very happy to bill them at my going hourly rate.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

Is it sad that it's now a pet peeve of mine when I see a colleague sharing their screen over Teams/Zoom and observe that they have ABP installed rather than uBlock Origin?

I mean, it's one thing to see colleagues with no adblockers--they just need to be told the Good News. But those ABP users...they chose incorrectly!

airstrike• 2 years ago

FWIW I'm an AdNauseam guy... did I also choose incorrectly??

NegativeLatency• 2 years ago

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

jqpabc1239• 2 years ago

"Personalized" advertising is just plain dumb --- and it is only a matter of time before advertisers are forced to reach the same obvious conclusion as consumers.

dotcoma3• 2 years ago

I agree, but I've been waiting for this moment to arrive for over a decade...

jqpabc1239• 2 years ago

It's coming. Progress is being made. A decade ago, the majority of Americans weren't using ad blockers.

riku_iki5• 2 years ago

"Personalized" advertising is just plain dumb

Could you elaborate? Imo it is the most efficient way of advertising..

jqpabc1239• 2 years ago

Searching for a product or visiting a web site can trigger "personalized" ads that follow you all over the internet --- even on totally unrelated web sites --- even after you've already made a purchase and no longer have any need for the product.

This violates your privacy, wastes your time and communication bandwidth and squanders advertiser's money. In other words, it is just plain dumb --- and most consumers are now blocking it.

A much more reasonable/sensible alternative --- "context sensitive" advertising. Only show ads when the consumer specifically expresses an interest --- not next week or next month, not while he is doing something totally unrelated, not long after a purchase has already been.

tim333• 2 years ago

I'm not a fan and block ads but doesn't it make sense to advertise people something they are likely to want?

I've seen it work fairly well on facebook with them popping up holiday suggestions that match fairly well with what users tend to book.

I've also had the awful version where I bought an oven and then for quite a while after all ads were for ovens. Which of course I had no interest in having just bought one. I don't know how long that went on for as I blocked them all.

I wouldn't mind the ad industry recommending me cheap and competent lawyers near me as I'm haveing issues with the expensive incompetent ones but that seems beyond the realms of possibility.

jqpabc1239• 2 years ago

doesn't it make sense to advertise people something they are likely to want?

Your oven experience is a perfect example.

Showing you oven ads when you are searching for an oven makes some sense. This is called "context sensitive" advertising.

Showing you oven ads on totally unrelated web sites long after you already bought one is the dumb "personalized" advertising that most people are now blocking.

skilled3• 2 years ago

Isn’t this extremely misleading based on the number of people they surveyed? That number is only 2,000 according to this PDF:

https://ghostery.cdn.prismic.io/ghostery/ZgP8q7LRO5ile652_Gh...

klez• 2 years ago

Isn't that how surveys work?

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

And from what I can tell, Censuswide is a credible market researcher.

skilled3• 2 years ago

2000 is 0.0007% of 260M adults living in the USA.

“Majority of Americans” is a bit off the rails, imo.

daveguy• 2 years ago

It would completely depend on the survey design and sampling process. If both of those are well considered N=2,000 is a large enough sample size.

lordnacho• 2 years ago

Imagine you land from another planet, and you discover that humans come in two major varieties.

How many of the 8 billion people would you need to survey to discover that roughly half were male?

It actually doesn't depend on the population. You could have landed 1000 years ago when the population was much smaller, and carry out a survey with the same number of samples, coming to the same conclusion.

noashavit• 2 years ago

"Personalized" ads do move the needle. It just depends on the audience. eCommerce brand, for example, and DTC companies use them on the regular to drive consumers to action and complete that purchase.

For more technical audiences, cookie based personalization doesn't really work, and contextual advertising has higher conversions.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

"use" is a funny word here, because the experience of using an ad blocker is very passive. It's not like you need to click a button to enable ad blocking on each page. Once you install the extension, it just happens.

I wager a lot of adblock users are non-technical people who don't even know they're using adblocking, but just had it installed by the local techie in their life to make both their lives easier.

dotcoma3• 2 years ago

Sure, but then again, most users are your mom and your uncle. Replace with "have an ad-blocker on their browser" if you wish; or "on their computer", as they would probably say.

Tell you more: most won't even know the difference between an ad-blocker and an anti ad-tracker, but this is exactly the battle that publishers and advertisers are losing: half the US Internet users are now "not reachable" by their ads.

notarget137• 2 years ago

Sounds like advertisement is something that people usually don't want to see or click on. I wonder why?

aaomidi3• 2 years ago

Adblocking is a security necessity.

The FBI has recommended the use of adblockers as well. Do your family a favor and install UBO on their devices.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

Feel free to add us [The Register] to your white list if you do use an ad blocker. We have full-time ops staff whose job it is around the clock to keep our sites clean of anything naughty.

Nah, I think I'll keep it on.

jocoda• 2 years ago

My objection to online advertising is that these are being served to us by third parties, not the site that we are visiting.

If the site I visit takes ownership and responsibility for the ads it shows, then I'm ok with that. But that's not what happens. If there is any issue whatsoever the site palms off the responsibility - "not my fault".

Either own it or foff.

edit - grammar

brycewray• 2 years ago

Still true, but now for different reasons...

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

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