Adblocking could be the saviour of high quality journalism

Reading the latest news, adblocking is heralded as the harbinger of the online apocalypse.

Many internet users have decided that they don't like to be tracked and profiled.

They don't like to be irritatingly diverted from the article that they're trying to read.

They don't like auto-play videos.

They don't like ads for things they've already bought, following them around the internet.

And they especially don't like their mobile data allowance being chewed up by advertising.

All of this means that the user base of adblocking software is on an upward trajectory and publishers are starting to worry.

According to PageFair, 21% of UK internet users use an adblocker. Amongst younger, tech-savvy audiences, the rate of blocking is much higher.

For publishers, this is a serious problem, because they get paid per thousand eyeballs viewing ads on their webpages.

For example, if I visit The Guardian, I see this

That banner at the top is generating a small amount of money per visitor for The Guardian.

With a blocker? Poof! It's gone. The page resizes into the gap and you'd never even know it had been there. The Guardian gets no money at all for my visit.

As an aside, Ghostery gives me a list of every tracker that's logging my visit to The Guardian and many of these will subsequently try to follow me around the web and see where else I go.

It's quite a big list...

That's FIFTY EIGHT separate trackers, just from a single visit to The Guardian homepage. No wonder some users want to opt out.

So adblocking continues on its upward trajectory, gains increasing penetration into mobile devices, and in the near future hits and then passes 50% of all users. All of our national newspapers go bust. It's inevitable, right?

Well no, actually, I don't think so.

I think adblocking could be very good for high quality journalism, but there'll be some short-term pain before we get there.

First a little bit of technical info...

Adverts are fairly easy for users to block, due to the way that they're bought and sold and embedded onto web pages. When you visit a newspaper's website, it loads the article you want to read from its own server and makes a request to some other server(s) for adverts. If you keep a big list of the servers that are used to deliver advertising, you can block them in your browser. The article loads and the adverts don't. Simple.

Now imagine the adblocking rate is 100% of internet users. What happens?

Any user, visiting any website, sees no third party adverts at all and publishers get no money.

But advertisers still want to talk to the The Guardian's readers. Of course they do, The Guardian's readers spend a long time staring at those pages and they're an educated bunch, with disposable income. Advertisers like people with disposable incomes and will work quite hard to get their brands in front of them.

Advertisers also no longer have an option to place their ads programmatically - splattering them across the web on loads of different sites and trying to follow individual users around - because as soon as they try to do that, the adblockers kick in and their messages disappear.

Suddenly, there are big online advertising budgets available, but no way to spend them programatically across lots of smaller websites.

So newspapers start selling advertising space the old fashioned way. They agree to place adverts on their site - delivered from their own servers, woven into articles and much tougher to block - and they agree a price to do it.

They might even negotiate that deal on the telephone. How quaint.

It's a model that looks a lot more like the traditional way of selling advertising space. Individually struck, higher value deals with large companies, rather than automated small-ads scattered across the web.

Why doesn't that already happen? Well sometimes it does, but currently, large proportions of online advertising budgets are used to buy programmatically. If you've got a choice between negotiations with individual newspapers, or bunging some cash at an ad exchange on the promise that the exchange will find your exact target audience wherever they are on the web and show them your ad, then of course you'll pick the automated route.

Adblocking takes away the automated route. Users don't like the tracking it entails and in increasing numbers, they're opting themselves out.

If you can't track and follow an individual user onto sites where its cheap to advertise, then you're going to have to buy your audiences in bulk, in the places where they congregate.

Adblocking doesn't leave an internet barren of advertising. It leaves large websites, with high quality audiences, in an incredibly strong position to negotiate their own deals.

For newspapers, it removes a huge number smaller websites from their competitive set and puts them back in the much stronger position that they used to enjoy.

Adblocking at scale would redirect online budgets towards those sites that can guarantee large, desirable audiences for advertisers. It could be the saviour of high quality journalism.

Adblock penetration has doubled in three years

Three years ago, I did some back of a fag packet maths to estimate the penetration of Adblock amongst UK internet users. It's something that's not easy to get data on, which surprises me because it's potentially pretty important. Yes, you don't pay for internet ads that are never served to users, but Adblock has the potential to severely limit the reach of an online campaign. You'd think at least the SEO community would want to know how many people run Adblock, because those people don't see paid search ads, making SEO all the more powerful.

For the uninitiated, Adblock sits in your internet browser - usually Firefox or Chrome - and blocks the links that are used to serve advertising. You see a website as normal, just with no ads on it and the mechanics are clever enough that it doesn't leave big white spaces on the page where the advertising would normally be. The site's regular content is flowed into the gaps left by ads that have been removed.

If you ask me, I think it's brilliant. Shhhhhh, don't tell anyone.

Three years ago, my best guess based on Firefox users running Adblock was a total UK internet user penetration of around 2.2%. Not really enough to worry about back then, but what about in 2012?

Since 2009, Firefox and Chrome have continued to grow, to a point where between them, they account for very nearly 50% of browser usage.

Both of these browsers can run a variety of blocking software and so potentially, we're looking at a lot more people avoiding adverts than we were three years ago.

This is where the maths gets a bit vague, but stay with me.

It's hard to get figures for how many users run blocking software, but Mozilla do share daily active user numbers for the Firefox addon.

Globally, we've got 15m daily active users of Adblock on Firefox.

And in mid 2010, we had 120m users of Firefox itself. These are the most recent stats I can find unfortunately. If we project the trend forward to 2012, we should be on about 150m active Firefox users by now.

Globally, that would give a penetration within the Firefox user base of around 10%.

Lets assume Chrome is about the same and is also running at about 10% penetration. We're going to have to assume that one, because I can't find any stats beyond "1,000,000+" users for Adblock on Chrome, via the Chrome webstore.

We saw earlier that Firefox and Chrome together account for 50% of browsers. I'm going to make a further assumption that virtually nobody using Internet Explorer has an ad blocking plugin installed. Plugins do exist, but it you're using Explorer, then you're almost certainly not the sort of user who's found out about Adblock. I'll leave Safari and Opera to one side too, in the interests of our estimate being deliberately aimed towards the low end. Adding to the low end nature of this guess are a variety of other plugins, which do a similar job to Adblock and which I haven't included.

So, 50% of browsers are Firefox or Chrome, and 10% of those users have Adblock installed = 5% total penetration. Ish.

Using a similar method to 2009, we've got a more than doubling of usage, from 2.2% then, to 5% now. It's still not so big that you'd panic, but is starting to become a significant minority of internet users, who don't see any of the paid-for advertising that brands throw at the web.

See you back here in another three years for more fag packet maths and the conclusion that it's broken the 10% mark?

There are ads on the web? Really?

Edit: I've updated the guesstimates in this post here.

Google has announced that it is to start serving ads to its users based on their browsing habits.

My first reaction? Surely nobody sees ads on the web any more. This is probably not the right place to admit that my work and home PCs both run Firefox with Adblock Plus installed. Internet Explorer is strictly for websites that won't work in Firefox, like DDS's dreadful BrandOcean.*

The original web ad-blockers left pages looking nasty. They didn't load the ads (sometimes) but left big spaces where they were supposed to be. Adblock Plus is cleverer, it removes the ad completely and your browser rearranges the page around it.

Adblock's not perfect. It's amazing to use Firefox for a while and wonder why a site is only bothering to use half the screen. My personal favourite is the Football365 Mailbox, about which I genuinely wondered for some time why it only put the content in a half screen column, before loading the same site in Explorer and seeing - and waiting for - tons of clutter on the right side of the screen.

The Google story set me wondering how many other people in the UK are using this tool. Are you?

Adblock Plus is running at 6.6m daily active users.



There are approximately 50m daily active users for Firefox worldwide, which gives a penetration for Adblock of 13%.

Lets make another jump and translate it to the UK (I do enjoy back of the envelope analytics.)

Indolent reports a UK Firefox penetration of 17.2% - lagging behind the rest of Europe.



(Warning: penetration figs are about a year out of date. This is marketing analysis after all.)


So let's assume the UK penetration of Adblock is about 2.2% (17.2% x 13%. Keep up at the back.)

That's low enough for advertisers to safely ignore for now. Turns out I'm a bit of a technology geek for having it installed. Definitely worth keeping an eye on that penetration figure though.

Mozilla could, if they wanted to, market a 'no ads on the web - ever!' version of Firefox with Adblock pre-installed, but I'm guessing they know how popular that would make them with the people who fund a large slice of their business.

As for me, I'm quite enjoying a web with no ads, free-riding off everybody else who is funding the websites I read. If you've just learned that Adblock Plus exists, please, for the sake of we 2.2%, don't tell anyone.


* Obviously my personal opinion and yes that's an out of context cheap shot, but if you work in an agency unfortunate enough to have bought this piece of software, I sympathise...