[petersouth]

My adsense money went from $1000/yr to $100/yr and now I'll be lucky if I break $25. Nothing changed with my users. My only guess is that everyone is using adblock.

[gitah]

You're right about ad block. Ad block grew an insane amount (300%) in the past two years:

http://i.imgur.com/XIf0JRW.png

[Scoundreller]

The graph shows it currently as being at 5%.

I really doubt any browser will start installing it by default, so I think adblock will be limited to: a) Really technical people (HNers) b) Friends of HNers that are bothered enough by the real web experience while on their friend's systems that they go ahead and install adblockers.

I don't see adblockers covering more than 10% of web users, and they're likely the least valuable 10% of web users (they may earn a lot, but they don't have burning holes in their pockets either).

[seanblanchfield]

Jumping in here as we produced that data. Global average is about 5%, but in US & UK it's about 15%. In much of Europe it's about 2X that. If you have a technical audience, 20% - 30% adblocking is now normal. If you are gamer-focused, 40% - 50% is normal.

The growth isn't driven by technical people any more; it's normal people who've grown up using web browsers and who don't think twice about installing an extension on Chrome. You're correct through that it is spreading through word of mouth. You can get more on the pagefair blog.

[tomjen3]

My brother - who is not a programmer, but skilled enough to run Linux - has just started using adblock a couple days ago. We are in that other part of Europe.

My point is that adblock usage doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent as we assume - at work (where everybody has admin rights on their work machines) maybe 10% of the non technical users have it. The point that makes people install it seems to be youtube ads.

[Throwaway90283]

Depends on the niche. I run a tech site with 1.2 million daily page views, and yet Google reports 400,000 ad impressions a day. The other 66% are being blocked. This isn't hard to believe, since all my tech friends run ad blockers.

[Scoundreller]

Traffic stayed the same and eCPM went down 97.5%?

I guess:

1) You write articles that are exclusively marketed toward an HN crowd (adblock-heavy).

2) Some advertiser(s) were heavily directly targeting users at your site and stopped

3) Your traffic stayed the same, but because of changing search results, so you got more low-value traffic while losing high-value traffic

I'm down 75% as well, but it's largely due to my abandoning my pages and competitors making specialized sites on my niches.

[tomrod]

Do you see adblock as a bad thing?

[petersouth]

I use it, but it wasn't until my money went away that I thought much about it. I definitely have less incentive to keep it going. I'd need to go through the hassle of getting more dedicated advertisers or sponsors now. So in that respect it's bad for websites in general.

[muyuu]

At least you're honest about not giving a flying one until it was your bottom line that tanked.