Barry Levine says, “The conventional wisdom about ad blockers goes like this: Users would stop using ad blockers if they got more value, or less annoyance, or less privacy invasion, or less malware from online ads.

But that’s missing a key statistic that ties feelings about ads to action about ad blockers.

Two weeks ago, for instance, the Reuters Digital News report found two of the leading reasons in the US for ad blocking were “volume of ads” and “ads that follow people.”

In December, Digital Content Next released its Consumer Ad Block Report, which found that:

– more than 70 percent dislike ads that expand over content or play with sound;
– 68 percent are concerned when ads track their behavior; and
– 57 percent notes their webpages load too slowly with ads.

These are just a few of the findings documenting what users don’t like about digital ads. And major responses are based on this conventional wisdom. For instance, The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s LEAN initiative — Light, Encrypted, Ad choice-supported, Non-invasive ads — aims to give ads a more user-friendly profile in order to counter the ad-blocking movement. Google’s AMP effort wants mobile pages and ads to load faster”.

The conventional wisdom on ad blocking is missing one key statistic

Marketing Land

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