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Comment by derwiki | Hacker News Reader

But what's the prevalence of people installing ad blockers? None of my non-techie friends do it, and many of my techie friends willfully choose not to (moral reasons).

Edit: I'll answer that for myself: as of 2015, about 15% of US internet users had ad blocking software[1]. Much higher than I expected.

[1] https://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblock-explorer/

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I did some testing earlier this year on a well trafficked YC companies site (so something with a pretty technical audience) and it was around 40% Ad Blocking and half of that analytics blocking.

The overall portion of a sites visitors doing blocking is all over the place (from 10-50%), but the Ad / Analytics blocking ratio has been pretty steady at around half.

As blocker users shift from ADP to uBlock (for performance or b/c they don't like 'acceptable ads') I suspect that ratio to really go up.

Blocking ads isn't just moral, it is imperative. Capitalism is an evolutionary force that selects for the most profitable business practices. Advertising allows businesses to buy profitable changes in behavior. If you understand why we fear biological superbugs, it should be clear why you should keep capitalist superbugs away. Advertising is destined to evolve into a perfect tool for behavior change. If it hasn't already.

Propaganda for fun, for profit, and for political gains dates a lot earlier than modern advertising.

And so does combating it.

Ads aren't going anywhere - there is too much money riding on it. I am willing to bet all that I possess that ads will be with us 20 years from now.

Your comparison with superbugs is apt: ads will evolve into hardier, less blockable forms (native ads, and as soon as someone figures it out, serving ads from the same domain as content)

Native ads are less likely to be malware vectors no?

Yeah... Or maybe it's just a (sometimes annoying) part of a market which, despite its flaws, has created the largest reduction in human suffering ever.

More and more people are using blockers. The problem is that the utility of the software is high, so the number of users installing ad blockers (Which is really easy. Thanks Chrome!) is going to outpace the number of users not using ad blockers. Depending on your demographics, over 50% of your traffic might be using an ad blocker. I recall reddit reporting numbers of over 80% in some instances.

depends on your public. If you target young males (video game for instance), you can expect ~30% block IIRC.

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