Postscript : Ad Tracking
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.
ad blockers ad tracking Data archive.pf.business