Mobile ad-blocking may not be the most used bit of tech right now, but it is rising especially in this part of the world. According to a report by Adobe and PageFair, the use of this technology in smartphones grew by 90 percent over the last year.
This means that about one-fifth of the world is blocking ads on their phones. Most of the browsers which provide these services are used in parts of South and South-East Asia, and – no surprises – China (159 million), India (122 million), Indonesia (38 million) and Pakistan (10 million) top the list.
Remember that UC Browser, owned by Alibaba, was arguably the first popular browser to offer such a liberty before other more mainstream apps in the West followed suit. And how can one forget the role of internet speeds in this at all.
The rise of ad-blocking can take away a potentially lucrative platform away from advertisers. With phones now majorly used for accessing the web, the blocking services could eventually create more of a headache than users on desktop.
And when it comes to more profitable markets, it is found that the reason for not using ad-blockers is often not ethics, but lack of knowledge. As a result, PageFair considers it only a matter of time till the trend catches on further to its 14 million North American and European users. Apple has already opened Safari to ad-blocking services.
With Opera, Mozilla and Samsung joining the fray, the industry could see less of an opportunity to grow. Last year alone, ad-blocking services resulted in revenue losses of almost $22 billion. It is recommended then to white-list at least the websites that you follow to keep them as they are.
UC Browser is still the best! Chrome flat out refuses to block ads even with adblock plus add on
Firefox is also as bad as Chrome
You can actually block ads on firefox for android pretty easily
Website owners bombard their visitors with ads, that’s why we have to install Adblock. What if you are browsing a page and upon clicking anywhere in the page you get tons of annoying popups?