Consumers Are Not Willing to Pay to Block Ads

If you’ve heard of Adpocolypse, and actually feel like it’s the end of the world for digital marketing, you have my permission to take a deep breath and relax. For those of you who have not heard of Adpocolypse, it is the seemingly detrimental trend of internet users employing ad blockers so they are not shown digital display ads. So if you just read that and now feel like it’s the end of the world for digital marketing, take a deep breath and relax. Finish reading this post before you go buy out all of the virtual milk and bread and go into survival mode.A recent study done by Tune is showing that Adpocolypse is probably getting blown out of proportion. Yes, there are ad blockers out there, but, for mobile advertising at least, they are a little over budget for many people. How much is over budget? A whopping one dollar a year. Don’t worry, you don’t need new glasses.According to this study, almost 70% of mobile users are not willing to pay anything to block ads. When you weigh that next to the measly 11.3% who are willing to pay one whole dollar a year, Adpocolypse doesn’t seem like nearly as big of a threat.

In the new ad blocking project called Flattr Plus, those who pay to block ads are contributing to a money cache to pay participating sites not to run ads. So instead of getting money from advertisers, these sites get paid by the community pot. But, this study by Tune is showing that those who are willing to pay for ad blocking would only generate about 9% of what publishers are currently getting from mobile ads. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think any business can run on only 9% of its current funding.Never fear – cheap people are here. And thanks to them, it looks like digital advertising is not in quite as big of a pickle as we thought. Long live digital marketing.