2022 PageFair Adblock Report

20 February 2024
Reports

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About the report

We’re excited to present the 2022 PageFair Adblock Report, the eighth report in this series.

In this year’s report, we learned that desktop adblocking has crept back up to its 2018 high. Since advertising revenue from mobile web is still a relatively poor monetization environment for most publishers, this is a trend reversal publishers should monitor closely.

Equally notably, 2021 brought a seismic shift in the landscape of strategies used by top US publishers to mitigate the revenue impact from adblocking, as publisher adoption of adblock walls (or “messaging”) as a standalone adblock recovery strategy declined substantially, with only 1 among the top 100 US publishers relying exclusively on it in this year’s analysis.

Curious to what precipitated this decline, we focused much of this year’s report on adblock walls, including a world-first UX study that tested how users react when they encounter adblock walls in a real-world setting. The study validated our survey findings from last year, finding that ~80% of adblock users consistently find adblock walls to be an annoyance, and therefore, do not convert.

Finally, by popular demand, we’ve brought back our adblocking world map, showing adblock rate by country as recorded by our proprietary adblock detection technology and analytics data.

Key insights

  • With 290M monthly active users globally, adblocking on desktop has climbed back close to its all-time-high from 2018
  • The average adblock rate across geos and verticals is 21%, as measured across >10B pageviews on 9,453 websites
  • 62% of the top 100 US publishers were using at least one adblock monetization strategy to reclaim advertising revenue in 2021
  • Use of adblock walls as a standalone adblock monetization strategy is in decline, with only 1 among the top 100 US publishers relying on it
  • 82% of adblock users prefer a lighter ad experience by default over receiving prompts to disable their adblocker or whitelist a site
  • Opt-in rate for Acceptable Ads has crossed 95% for the first time since we started analysing and reporting on its userbase
  • 94% of global publishers surveyed say they cannot precisely quantify the revenue loss incurred due to adblocking
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