Ad Blockers: Something Wicked This Way Comes

If you haven’t heard, there is an interesting phenomenon growing online that could come to affect the sale of vehicles at your dealership. If you are like most auto dealers, you have some form of online advertising working to bring you traffic to your website and to your store. Even if you don’t, your manufacturer does.

That’s where consumer use of ad blockers comes into the picture. According to a report issued last month by PageFair and Adobe, 6% of Internet users are blocking the ads that come to the Web pages they visit. But ad blocker use is growing fast.

The report also says the cost in lost ad revenue will be more than $21 billion in 2015. In most cases, ad-blocking software is installed by a consumer, and the software uses a database of ad servers to automatically block ads from all sites the consumer visits:

downloads.pagefair.com/reports/2015_report-the_cost_of_ad_blocking.pdf

An article in Fortune magazine says that ad-block use grew by 41% last quarter:

fortune.com/2015/09/21/apple-adblock-stats/

Fortune says ad blockers are mostly men, primarily millennials, and they tend to live on the Northeast and Pacific coasts. For the most part, they’re not blocking ads on mobile devices yet.

One of the problems that comes with ad blocking is that many websites are funded by ads. The free content you see is that way because the site can sell advertising to create revenue.

If you take away the revenue because many people are blocking ads, the content will no longer be free. As the Fortune article points out, it’s ironic that Google’s online advertising accounts for 90% of its revenue, but it’s Google Chrome that is driving most of the ad-block growth.

It will be interesting to see how the advertising community reacts to ad blocking, and how it will affect your ability to use online ads to drive traffic to your dealership.