Who Ad-blockers Really Are
We know about how important and how comfortable it feels to have an ad-blocker. But have you ever asked yourself who ad-blockers really are and why they are doing it? We have been thinking about this for a while now and we want to show you “the face” of the ad-blockers and how the population looks.
Ad-blocking has been around for some time and, out of specific reasons, it has become one of the most debated subjects on the internet recently. You might have also heard about YouTube’s Red subscription that completely removes ads from your YouTube pages for a small price of $10 a month. Why? Because this trend is growing fast.
The Global Web Index has some very interesting information for us, showing who these ad-blockers are and where they come from. Not surprisingly, the ones leading the charge are young people in between the ages of 16 and 24, followed up closely by the 25 to 34 age group. Also, the majority of ad-blockers are men.
If you look at the statistics, you can notice two important “stereotypes”. The younger age is familiar with the internet and the features you can use and men, who are perceived as a little more technologically advanced are paving the way. These are, of course, stereotypes but they do seem to fit the reality a little bit here.
Now if we zoom out of the picture, we can even notice that the ad-blockers represent the same population on every continent. Europe is leading with 30% of the users, North America is following close with 28% and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Pacific Asia are all on third place with 27% of the users.
One thing is for certain: if the majority of the ad-blockers are young, it means that the next generation of internet users will want to have nothing to do with ads. So the add technique is still working now because people are not yet aware that ad-blocking can be done. As the young emerge and “educate” themselves with ad-blocks, ads will slowly die.
So what do you think? Will you stop using ads soon? Because a lot of people already are and they are talking about the major advantages. Loading a lot of ads also means that the site you want to access will load slower than it should, translating into a poor experience.
Photo Credits: wikimedia.org
