How is the world’s biggest boycott doing?

An attempt to depict ad blocking using AI.

Eight years ago, I posted The Biggest Boycott in World History, which was about ad blocking. At that time, hundreds of millions of people were blocking ads online: enough to justify the headline. Then, a few days ago, Cory Doctorow kindly pointed to that post in one of his typically trenchant Pluralistic posts.

So I thought I’d check to see how that boycott is doing these days.

It’s hard to find first sources of hard numbers. Instead there are lots of what I’ll call claims. But some of those do cite, and/or link to a source of some kind. Here are a few:

Brian Dean‘s Backlinko sources Hootsuite, saying 42.7% of Internet users employ ad blockers. Hootsuite, however, wants me to fill out a form that I am sure will get me spammed. So I’m passing on that. Meanwhile there are other interesting stats cited. Growson Edwards on Cipio.ai surfaces a bunch of Hootsuite graphics with interesting data.Statista last January said “the ad blocking user penetration rate in the United States stood at approximately 26 percent in 2020, indicating that roughly 73 million internet users had installed some form of ad blocking software, plugin, or browser on their web-enabled devices that year. While awareness of these services lies at almost 90 percent, the number of internet users actively leveraging the technology has stagnated in recent years following visible changes in online user behavior. The switch from desktop to mobile has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on ad block usage: As internet users increasingly browse the web via mobile devices, desktop ad block usage rates in the U.S. and many other parts of the world are dropping, albeit at varying speeds. While mobile ad blocking adoption is still at a nascent stage in the U.S., the global number of mobile ad blocking browser users is rapidly increasing.” On another page, Statista says marketers “can conquer ad blocking by offering personalized advertising.” Anyone really want that?Blockthrough, an advertising company offers a 2022 adblock report that requires filling out a form. So I passed on that one too, but can report that its “key insights” are these: “With 290M monthly active users globally, adblocking on desktop has climbed back close to its all-time-high from 2018,” and “The average adblock rate across geos and verticals is 21%, as measured across >10B pageviews on 9,453 websites.”Surfshark has some cool maps showng which countries hate ads most and least, based on searches for ad blocking software. (France was at the top.)

Perhaps more interesting than any of those stats (all of which are unsurprising) is attempting to get an AI image creator either to create a graphic representing populations that block ads versus others that don’t or to depict ad blocking itself in some way. Trying to do the former failed for me. Trying to do the latter generated the image above, among other less interesting ones.