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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Won't Google defacto lose all mildly informed users once adblocking is no longer feasible in Chrome?

I think the average NH user overestimates how many people use ad blockers. We’re the minority.

yeah whenever I use someone else family/friend laptop for doing something it usually is without adblock. I ask if its okay and install it for them

It’s roughly 30-40% world wide and latest stats in the US say between 25 and 35%.

I don’t know if people are overestimating but it sure as shit does surprise me each and every day.

I think some PM at google saw that 50% of users use adblock on https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users and said "hey, if we block ads, revenue will double".

also re adblock users being the minority, i think if we were, google a 1T company won't bother with this. It has to be a large chunk of their viewers.

I'm not sure. I think ad-blockers have become wayyyy more popular. I know a decade ago it was estimated at like ~3% but I would bet that, in the US at least, it's close to or even above 50%. They've just become so popular - I think there were even commercials for some products that blocked ads at one point/ privacy ads.

uBlock origin has 10,000,000+ users on the web store. Adblock has 10,000,000+ users. Adblock Plus has 10,000,000+ users.

I believe that 10,000,000+ means "any number above 10m" and not something like "between 10m and 100m", which means that 10m could potentially be a vast underestimation.

But either way, that's 30m devices, minimum, running adblock. That's 10% of the US population. Just for 3 adblockers I picked at random. And I would not be surprised to find that the number was 10x, even 50x higher than that.

Does it really have 10M+ users, or 10M+ downloads? Because they are not the same thing.

I know I've downloaded uBlock Origin probably about 20 times over the years.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/ublock%20origin

"users", which I assume means "devices".

Killing ad-blockers outright would likely cause many people to switch, but maybe not all. I am shocked to see that people buy "smart TVs" that are basically just TVs except that you don't just get commercials, you also get ads.

Instead of just buying a monitor and plugging your laptop in to stream... which seems far cheaper and better.

So I think a lot of people actually don't really mind ads that much tbh.

They mind. A lot of people have set TV apart from Internet, and that is an age thing. Peeps grew up with TV.

Others just do not know how to setup a media experience and just take what their Roku, or other media device gives them.

As younger people age up, these stats will change significantly.

It is that future fueling ad block wars, IMHO

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