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Comment by tragic | Hacker News Reader

You're probably right against the parent, but in the long term I would expect use of ad blockers to rise, simply because ads are getting observably more bloated and intrusive.

Elementary example: the likes of us will get requests from our tech-illiterate friends and relatives - "my internet is broken. It's really slow." And we will install ABP/ublock whatever.

This is, of course, assuming that there are no dramatic 'interruptions' - eg, browsers ceasing to support ABP-type extensions, the ads-versus-adblockers arms race moving decisively in the former's favour; etc.

I can't find any numbers on adblocker usage over time during the recent period - would be a good thing to look at - but here's the google trend, FWIW. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ad%20blocker&cmpt=q&...

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Thanks for the graph, that's quite interesting. Do you have any insight as to why it's risen so sharply during the past three years? I'm thinking maybe it's just connected to the increase in overall (especially smartphone) users of the internet? Even people who have been using desktops for years, use the internet more thanks to smartphones and thus ads become more pervasive in their life, thus perhaps prompting an increase as well?

Maybe you can share your thoughts on why you think it would be any indication that the overall percentage of internet users using ad blockers has gone up?

That certainly could be it - it's literally the only graph I could pull up at short notice. There are stats around but like browser usage etc they tend to come from this website or that. Based on some other numbers[0], trends seem to be more or less in line with what you'd expect: more blockers installed for visitors to tech-related sites; more installed on Firefox than IE, and Linux than Windows; etc. In that link, you're looking at nearly 10% of impressions blocked as of 3 years ago (which is obviously not the same thing as unique visitors, but I would be surprised if that was not higher than a few years before that).

I'm merely stating a hypothesis here, really - I have in mind how it was that people installed things like the google toolbar to block popups, and then browsers blocked popups by default, and then there were no more popups (OK, not quite, but still). The more irritating something is, the more likely a user will take steps to do something about it.

Time will tell.

[0] http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... - sorry for the hated Quora ink

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