To Combat Ad Blockers, Media Companies Should Shift Their Business Model

Ad blocking is a hot topic nowadays, both for news media companies and for users.

• Globally, 200 million people are blocking ads today, with a 94% growth year-over-year.
• 16% of Firefox mobile users were blocking ads at the end of the second quarter 2015.
• Ad blocking technology is no longer tied only to young users (54% of male and 31% of female users within the 18-29 age use ad blockers), as users above 60 years old take advantage of them (25% of male users and 15% of females over 60 use ad blocking software).

People block ads for many reasons:

• Ads obscure content.Privacy.
• Bandwidth.
• Slow Web site load.
• Because they can.

What news media houses do with that problem was quite a discussion on the first day of the INMA European Media Conference on Monday.