Market research shows potential for mobile adblocking growth in Ukraine

Market research shows potential for mobile adblocking growth in Ukraine

This might be a surprise to some advanced adblocking users, but there are people who have never blocked ads or who have never heard about adblocking on mobile. While in some countries, adblock penetration is quite high, there places where adblockers are not widely used, especially on mobile devices. 

Ukraine is one of such countries. According to the latest PageFair report, adblock penetration per online capita in Ukraine comprises 13%. Not a low number, but it relates only to the desktop. Unfortunately, there is no data available for mobile. Free Adblocker Browser team decided to organize a series of in-depth interviews in Ukraine to understand how people use adblocking solutions and if they heard about mobile adblocking. To make it even more interesting, we talked only to people who have never used adblockers on their mobile devices. And to be honest, it was not hard to find such interviewees.

 

Here is what we found out:

1. The majority of the people we interviewed were aware of mobile adblock, but it never came to their minds to actually download an adblocker on a mobile device. However, they’ve been using adblocking solutions on the desktop for quite a while. Usually, it was installed by the IT admins on their work computers.
2. Some people have not heard it was possible to block ads on mobile at all. Also, some users were surprised that it is possible not to see ads in videos if you open streaming websites in Free Adblocker Browser.   
3. All of the users were surprised by how clean the web pages look without ads. During our interviews, we asked users to open the websites they usually browse. Most of the times, people would open news websites, weather services, and video streaming sites. Unexistence of pop-ups, huge banners, preloaded video ads, and annoying redirections was a pleasant and unexpected surprise for our interviewees.
4. Youtube lovers mentioned that it was especially comfortable to watch videos on Youtube when opening it in Free Adblocker Browser. No video ads and no targeted display ads were shown.
5. After using Free Adblocker Browser for a couple of days, it became very inconvenient to surf the web in other browsers without a built-in adblock as users started noticing ads even more and get distracted.   

 

Ukrainians are not the most active users of Free Adblocker Browser. However, over the past year, we’ve noticed a substantial increase of interest towards FAB from Ukraine. The number of daily installs increased twice and continues to grow, which lets us expect that adblocking penetration on mobile devices will keep growing in this country.