25 percent of smartphone users have ad blockers, according to survey

By Christian de Looper Published March 7, 2016

Now that ad blockers are available on iOS and Android, many more users seem to be downloading the apps. A mobile marketing company called Tune has released a new report suggesting that as many as 24.6 percent of mobile users have some kind of ad blocking app or Internet browser installed.

Tune surveyed almost 4,000 people in the U.S. and Europe, and found that ad blocker adoption is growing extremely quickly. While only 2.4 percent of respondents said that they had downloaded an ad blocker in the four to six months before November, 7.8 percent said that they had downloaded their ad blocker in November 2015. The adoption rate is highlighted by the fact that Tune projects 80 percent of users will have downloaded ad blockers by the fourth quarter of 2017.

ad-blockers — Tune

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Of course, there are a few things to note. Tune did not survey the actual data on users’ phones, but rather simply asked them what they have on their phones. Because of this, results could vary quite widely, with 21 percent of respondents even saying that they didn’t know if they had an ad blocker or not. Not only that, but just because someone has downloaded an ad blocker doesn’t mean they’re actually using it.

Still, the fact is that ad blocker use is growing quickly — especially considering the fact that Apple recently started allowing ad blockers on its iPhones — may be cause for concern for publishers.

Interestingly enough, there doesn’t seem to be any real correlation between using ad blockers and demographic. The report noted that young people in Europe were more likely to use ad blockers, but by a negligible few percentage points.

The debate on ad blocking is likely to continue to heat up in the near future. Publishers rely on ads to make money from their content, but ad blockers take a chunk of that potential profit away from them. Because of this, advertisers and publishers have started looking towards ad blocker developers to change how they block ads, only filtering out some more intrusive ads rather than ads in general.

You can see the full report for yourself here.

Christian de Looper

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…

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