A new PageFair report has shown that the rate of use has gone up by hundreds of millions of device users.
According to a recent report based on a study by PageFair, a publishing consultancy, mobile ad blocking took off in 2015 to the point that it reached a massive growth of 90 percent when compared to the year before.
The report indicated that by 2016, there were an estimated 419 million people using this mobile ad stopping software.
This means that of the 1.9 billion smartphone users around the globe, about 21 percent are using mobile ad blocking in their browsers. The report from PageFair – which also offers anti-ad-blocking services to marketers – was titled “Adblocking Goes Mobile.” The report investigated the use of ad blocking software in mobile browsers and broke down its results into various regions around the globe.
The report showed that most of the mobile ad blocking was occurring in the Asia-Pacific region.
PageFair’s report indicated that of all the mobile browsers with ad blocking installed, 93 percent was located in the Asia-Pacific region. This suggested that 36 percent of all smartphones in that part of the globe were equipped with active advertising blockers.
Comparatively, in the United States, these browser plugins were installed in only 1.24 percent of smartphones. The firm estimated that in the U.S. there are about 2.8 million people who are using mobile browsers with a blockers installed. In Europe, it estimated that 2.7 percent of all smartphones were blocking ads.
The report also pointed out that there has been growth in content-blocking mobile apps; another term for software that puts a stop to the display of data collection code, sponsored content and other types of advertising and associated components.
As of September 2015, Apple’s iOS 9 upgrade brought content blocking APIs, which made it possible for mobile ad blocking and content stopping to be installed into the mobile version of its Safari browser as well as in third party mobile apps that use an iOS WebView component in order to display this type of marketing content. This opened the door for a much larger number of smartphone users to easily install content blocking into their mobile devices.
