[belter]

I am even more amazed, about companies paying for ads, while seeming to ignore most users will not see them as they use adblocks plugins.

[lkbm]

https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/#topicOverv... suggests adblocker usage was around 26% in the US [2020], which is much higher than I would have guessed, but still well under 50%.

[jjulius]

>... most users will not see them as they use adblocks plugins.

Forgive my ignorance, but is there data around what percentage of browsers has an adblocker installed? I am inclined to assume that a tech-focused forum such as HN is going to use them at a much more disproportionate rate relative to the average, non-tech-savvy joe, and therefore further assume that they're not as widely adopted as we might think.

I could totally be wrong, though.

Edit: 42.7% globally, but it varies by country. The US, for instance, only sees 38.8% adoption.[1] Hardly what I would call "most".

[1]https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

[jart]

42.7% is unbelievably huge. Can the tech economy even survive if half the people are taking free rides? For the longest time it was no more than 10% since only the technical class used the things. Nowadays corporate and government policymakers are requiring adblockers be installed on normy computers.

[rjmalagon]

I see ad blockers as good filters for them. Someone that feels annoyed by ads to the extent of making the effort to install ad blockers is not a good target for ads too. Less tech-savvy and caring users are perfect targets for ads.

[psychphysic]

They won't be paying for content that wasn't loaded.

[belter]

Is that true in all cases?

It seems for example for Cost-per-mille (CPM) advertising if a user has an ad-blocker, they will not see the ad, but it would still count towards the number of impressions if the ad request is made?

[psychphysic]

> in all cases

No idea of course. I couldn't tell you any anything in ALL cases.

But the ad space is dominated by a few companies and all do that as far as I know.

The other dominating ad space is spliced into videos and they certainly know you will skip around if you can on YouTube.

> If a request is made

It won't be made that's what adblockers do. Or it won't land in the case of pihole/DNS level blockers.

Otherwise it wouldn't speed up browsing and tracking would continue unhindered.

[ElectricalUnion]

There's some adblockers focused on disrupting tracking and those will both intentionally load ads and automatically click on every one of them for you.

https://adnauseam.io/

[psychphysic]

Neat idea, I'd worry that the tracking is worse than the benefit.

That said I routinely let long YouTube ads play while I go off to do something else. Personal best was circa 1.5hour ad!

Someone told me that costs them big bucks so long as it's not skipped.