Free Adblocker Browser reveals survey results on mobile adblocking in the UK
A majority of the British mobile adblocking users believe that online publishers should make money by providing paid content rather than by showing ads.
Most British adblock users realize that to provide high-quality content, publishers need to make money. And a better way to do it is by making content only available to users that pay, rather than showing annoying advertising to everyone. Such are the results of the survey conducted by Free Adblocker Browser – a browser for Android users with a built-in adblock feature.
The Association of Online Publishers estimated that larger U.K. publishers are losing up to £2 million ($2.6 million) a year in ad revenue due to ad blocking. At the same time, the number of people installing adblockers on their devices is constantly growing.
The number of downloads of Free Adblocker Browser in the UK grew by 40% over the last year. UK mobile users are among most active adblock users comparing to other countries. Every day, they spent around 40 minutes for browsing while using Free Adblocker Browser from their mobile devices
In a recent survey conducted by Free Adblocker Browser, most respondents (62%) stated that the main reason to use an adblocker is, obviously because they don’t want to see ads while browsing. However, some users are also very concerned with safety and privacy issues. 17.3% of respondents replied that the main reason why they use Free Adblocker Browser is that it saves them from viruses, malware, phishing and other scams. 10.2% stated that they want to keep their privacy protected.
The most unfavorable ad formats are pop-ups – they received 44.5% of respondents’ votes. Non-skippable video ads and banner ads also irritate mobile users.
In a struggle to retain ad revenues, some publishers require whitelisting their websites or turn off the adblockers, otherwise, they don’t let users view their content. The survey shows that in most cases such websites are losing the users. 71,6% of respondents of FAB survey replied they don’t agree to whitelist the website. After such a request, 41% of users leave the page and search for the information elsewhere. 17,5% agree to whitelist the website temporarily and then turn their adblockers on again. And only 11% of respondents turn off their adblocker.
Another way publishers use to grow their revenues is a paid subscription. According to FAB survey results, it works for around 10% of the users – they subscribe if they like the website and visit it often. 36.3% believe they can find information for free on other websites, so they don’t buy subscriptions. There are also other reasons why users don’t go for the paid subscription. 25% of respondents stated it’s getting too expensive to sign up at every page that requires a subscription. 14.5% refer to privacy issues as they don’t want to leave their personal data. 13% don’t want to spend time on registering on the websites.
Due to various reasons, the majority of the British adblock users are not subscribed to any websites (56.3%). However, the rest of the respondents confirmed they are subscribed to some amount of websites.
However, users agree that to provide high-quality content publishers need to make money either by showing ads or by asking to pay for the content – 64.2% percent agreed with this statement. When asked “How do you think publishers should make money?” almost 58% said it should be done by making content only available to users that pay.
“The interesting fact is that even though a lot of people think that information online should stay free, and they are not ready to pay for the content, more and more users agree to subscribe to the websites that are interesting to them. And we see that almost a half mobile adblock users according to the results of our surveys are subscribed to a certain number of websites. Another interesting thing is that there are certain reasons keeping users away from subscribing – like privacy issues, or time and money they need to spend to subscribe to each website they like. These are some things that can be improved by industry players,” said Winfried Londar, Free Adblocker Browser founder.
The survey was conducted by Free Adblocker Browser online. 400 browser users provided their responses during Sep 25 – Oct 6, 2017.
Find out the results of the survey in the US in our previous blog post.