We all hate ads, right? Especially those ads that are in your face, and the ones that auto-play audio when you open up a new webpage. Larry Page even stated during a shareholder meeting recently that Google as well as other advertisers, need to work on how ads are displayed. Saying that many ads are very annoying to the user and often times slows down the loading of a webpage. Which isn’t a good experience for many. The ads that Google have put into Gmail are actually quite nice. They are out of the way, and don’t hinder the user’s experience in using Gmail on the web or on their smartphone.
AdBlockers have become very popular lately, in fact there is now an Adblock Plus browser in the Play Store, which is a bit surprising it was approved. Since Google is now approving apps manually, and that would cut into their revenue. Additionally, Google had removed all kinds of AdBlock apps from the Play Store recently.
A new report that came out this week states that Google lost around $6.6 billion in ad revenue last year due to ad blockers. That is about 10% of Google’s annual revenue. That’s a pretty sizable chunk, especially with Nexus sales being down and ads being about 95-96% of Google’s revenue. Ads are important, as you’re seeing more and more people working online for sites like Android Headlines, and the ads are what keep the lights on. Unless you want to start paying to read content, ads are going to be there. Yes they are annoying, and hopefully the ad industry takes note and works on fixing those ads.
Currently, Google doesn’t have a fix for these adblockers. All they’ve really done is paid to have their ads whitelisted with some adblock developers. But that only goes so far, and if they are paying to have the ads whitelisted, then they aren’t going to be making a whole lot of money. While Google lost around $6.6 billion last year due to ad blocking – and that was only on desktop, not counting mobile – then I’d expect the number to be even larger in 2015.