AdBack publishes the first ranking of websites losing money due to adblockers
AdBack, the French start-up that analyses adblocker users’ behaviours and helps websites regain control of their advertising income, just published the first ranking by website of estimated annual losses in advertising due to adblockers.
Losses are affecting all websites and lines of business
The ranking, based on the 1 million websites with the greatest number of monthly viewers per country, lists the top 100 websites losing the largest advertising income. The first lesson to be drawn is that all players and sectors are affected – from E-commerce to online video giants, the media or adult websites. Among the world’s top 100, websites like YouTube or Yahoo rank 6th and 7th respectively, losing more than 215 million dollars annually. Losses amount to nearly 470 million dollars for the first website on the list.
The top 10 websites in the UK are:
A growing phenomenon
Over the past few years, the number of adblocker users has increased, mainly because of intrusive ads and data protection, as shown in the latest IAB-IPSOS study in March 2016. In the UK, 22% of web users use adblockers. Worldwide, the number of adblocker users reaches 419 million. The main reasons they mention are: online activity is disrupted by advertising (85%) and increased annoyance due to advertising (71%). Antoine FERRIER-BATTNER, the founder and CEO of AdBack, has analysed these trends for several years. “For content publishers, advertising income losses due to adblockers are estimated between 15 and 20%. For other publishers, whose size or business model entails free access to content, the loss reaches 15% to 20% or their global income”, he says.
The ranking aims at raising awareness about this issue and potential solutions to
be implemented
Antoine FERRIER-BATTNER, CEO of AdBack, explains: “The goal is to raise awareness about the scale of the adblocking phenomenon. In the UK, the estimated income loss could reach 20 million euros per year for a large website like dailymail.co.uk or 12 million euros for amazon.co.uk, and even more for certain categories of websites whose users tend to use more adblockers than average. The phenomenon affects publishers and advertisers alike. Publishers’ income is reduced, which threatens the funding of their activity. As for advertisers, the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns is undermined by adblocking.
In this context, AdBack’s mission is to offer alternative solutions to advertising to access content, and also to adapt these solutions to every user profile. The start-up laid the groundwork for this in fall 2016 in cooperation with GESTE, in the framework of their awareness campaign about adblocking which gathered all the French media.
“With AdBack,” Antoine FERRIER-BATTNER explains, “we’re developing tools to enable users and publishers to communicate again, in order to reach a win-win situation. That is why we come up with a consulting approach tailored to the needs of each publisher, whether they’re big or smaller in size. It’s also true if you’re in the news, online sales and entertainment business. With our solutions, 28% to 60% of the income that is the main source of remuneration of publishers can be recovered. We can reach three times more web users by displaying targeted messages offering alternative solutions to mere adblocker deactivation. These solutions can be video advertising, mini-surveys, subscriptions to newsletters… All sorts of options to convince users to accept advertising instead of imposing advertising on them.
Ranking methodology
On its website, AdBack allows to visualize the worldwide ranking of the websites, filter by country, search for a particular website or submit a website that does not appear in the list
in order to know its lost income. AdBack used Alexa’s ranking of 1 million websites based on traffic measurement, and estimated the advertising income loss for each of these websites.
Here is the calculation method:
Number of blocked elements x $0.42 CPM x adblocker rate of the country x monthly page views x 12
