In 2016, 14% of Users are Blocking Ads
Data shows big differences in adblocking by country
Optimal.com is building an adblocking service to help consumers, and we also give major websites tools to measure the rate at which users are blocking ads on their pages.
Below is a summary of data we’ve collected anonymously from over 30 million users from 1/1/16 to 2/13/16. We plan to release more aggregate information in the near future, especially to understand the many differences between mobile and desktop ad blocking. On this latter point for now I will only say that desktop adblocking is approximately 10x more prevalent than mobile adblocking (for the time being).
While our dataset has visits from over 240 countries, the traffic profile is somewhat skewed to the United States, so we ended up with an unweighted average blocking rate of 13.7% and a weighted rate of 14.0% (we used Internet Live Stats to weight by internet user%).
Here is the summary by top 50 countries for combined mobile and desktop ad blocking, with a comparison to the US% of 11.7%, ordered by their rank in our sample but also showing their rank when weighted figures are used:
As you can see, adblocking is far more prevalent in Europe with Poland leading the way at 31.2% on average! South Africa, the Philippines and South Korea are examples of large countries with adblocking rates under 10%. Smaller but still interesting, here are the next 50 countries, 51–100:
