Online marketers to take $22-bn hit from online ad blocking software in 2015: Study

The use of online ad blocking software, which had seen double-digit growth, was now moving into mobile, apart from desktop devices.

The growth could cost $22 billion to marketers this year, a new study from PageFair and Adobe showed.

Unless publishers could find better ways to earn revenues, ad blocking's rapid growth posed an "eminent threat" to the web as it was known, PageFair co-founder and CEO Sean Blanchfield said.

Worldwide, the number of people using ad blockers over the past 12 months had grown by 41 per cent, to 198 million monthly active users, according to the study released today.

The use of ad blocking had gained even faster acceptance in the US, which saw a 48-per cent increase to 45 million users -- about 16 per cent of the country's entire online population -- between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015.

"The Cost of Ad Blocking" report predicted that $41.4 billion in online advertising would be blocked globally by 2016, with around half of that amount -- $20.3 billion -- affecting online ad revenues in the US.

Ireland-based, PageFair was founded in 2012 to "help create a more sustainable advertising ecosystem" that supported online revenues for web sites without alienating users.

The sites that take the hardest hit due to ad-blocking software are ones that attract a young, tech-savvy audience, or have a more male audience. The report specifically pointed out that visitors to gaming sites were the ones who were ''significantly more likely to block advertising.''

As against this regular visitors to health, charity, and government sites were the least likely to block ads.

Site publishers depend mainly on advertising to drive revenues and the ad blocking software represented a major threat to them.

Their dependence on advertising that which was offering declining returns, necessitated increasing the amounts of ads to make up the difference.

At the same time, site visitors installed ad blockers to deal with the increase in ads and prevented advertising networks from tracking them across the web.

However, if too many people were to block ads those sites would end up starved for funding. The challenge was to find the golden mean between acceptable types of advertising and returns that would pay staff and server costs.

The online advertising market in India is projected to reach Rs3,575 crore by March 2015, a 30-per cent rise from Rs2,750 crore posted as of March 2014, according to a study. (See: Online advertising market to touch Rs3,575 crore)