[agiacalone]

I teach CS at a state university, specifically computer security. At the beginning of this semester, I did a poll of my students and asked if they use any form of ad-blocking. Less than a third of my students did, and not many more even knew about browsers other than Chrome or Safari. This was out of a class of ~110.

Granted, it's anecdotal, but if 66% of my upper-division CS students don't even know about Firefox and ad-blocking, than I seriously doubt many non-tech people do.

Similarly, after that lecture, I had a student come to my office hours and ask for more info about ad-blockers. I had them open up msn.com and showed them the large banner ad on the page. It took a few seconds for them to even realize they were being advertised to! I then showed them my browser, nice and ad-free.

I get the impression that people have gotten so used to ads flashing in their face that they gloss over them. But the damage is still done.

[la_fayette]

Although I didn't collect numbers, but I made a similar experience in my workplace. I assume many people are highly distracted by ads and work efficiency is even reduced. Even many software engineers seem to not be aware of ublock... Would be interesting to know how many students started using an ad blocker at the end of your lecture :)

[Exoristos]

That's not anecdotal; that's a small study.

[sshine]

I did a poll in my CS class last year and half the students knew of it. This is a trade school level CS class so the number struck me as impressive. In another light, it is pretty low.

[jowea]

It's called banner blindness. The brain ends up trained to do the adblocking itself.

[illiac786]

No, the brain doesn’t Adblock, that’s the misconception. It gets used to ads to a point where it is not registered _consciously_ anymore. But the ad works subconsciously very well, armies of marketing people studied this.

[randomNumber7]

Brainblock should be the name.

[xnx]

Mindshield