From time to time, my newsletter gets a little TOO long and then I cut and move some of the more self-contained chunks to here, so that people can read the newsletter and if interested can jump to here for more detail. This is one of those chunks.
Are we winning? Well a whole lot more than we might have been pre-internet.
Ad blockers are used by some 25% of internet users in 2019. In real terms, this means that 25% of internet advertising that uses trackers will not reach their intended audience. (It’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but the point is that somehow the word got out that people were being tracked and it was those pesky Ads doing all the tracking - enter Adblocking and so an industry was born and an ‘arms race’ ensued.)
The peak of the internet searching for the term ‘Ad blocker’ was September 2015.
Me - I call it ‘tracker blocking’. There are sites that allow advertising and do not track. Ad blockers don’t work there - because there is no tracking to be blocked.
But there is no escape that at one point people were increasingly aware of ad blocking - what it was doing and most importantly - what it was doing to them. They got interested. And then it all fell away.
That's the mistake - we need to keep piling on. Keep reminding people what is going on.