Mobile Ad Blocking: Who’s Doing It and Why

Mobile ad blocking installs just spiked 3X in the last three months. But who is installing ad blocking browsers and apps? And why?

A little slice of everyone, it turns out.

Based on the data collected in our survey of almost 4,000 smartphone owners in North America and Europe, it’s clear that there’s no one single demographic group is blocking ads on mobile. Rather, it’s a little chunk of everyone, from teens to adults, women to men, and Americans to Europeans.

Young vs Old

Young to middle-aged adults block ads on mobile just a bit more than others. But clearly, even those aged 65+ have installed apps or browsers that can block ads in some cases — or had them installed by others.

Interestingly, teens are the least likely of any age group to report having installed an app on their smartphones to block ads. That’s surprising for a number of different reasons, including that teens are both a heavily marketed group and that they are, on the whole, fairly technically savvy.

Women vs Men

Women tend to block ads a little less than men, although the differences are fairly minor. 28.6% of men report having installed one more mobile ad blocking apps, while 22% of women claim the same.

Interestingly, while just under 18% of men say they’re “not sure” whether they’ve installed a mobile ad blocking solution, 24% of women are unsure as well. Traditional gender differences may play a role here, as men might be less likely to publicly admit a lack of knowledge.

Android vs iOS

Android users tend to block ads more frequently than iPhone owners. 27% of Android owners say they’ve installed ad blocking apps, but only 22% of iOS users.

Americans vs Europeans

While Europe is widely regarded as more focused on privacy than the U.S., that’s not something we see a lot of with regard to ad blocking behavior. While 24% of Americans copped to using ad blockers on their smartphones, just a slightly higher percentage of Europeans admitted it:

A caveat here: we could only gather European data from the UK. Other nations such as Germany are generally more privacy and security conscious than the British, so it’s likely our European results would be higher if we had gathered more data from a larger number of countries — something for us to address in a future research effort.

So Who Is It?

When it comes right down to it, the ad blocking cohort is an almost perfectly representative demographic slice.

While ad blocking mobile users skew slightly to young and middle-aged adults, men, Android users, and Europeans, there really aren’t many huge, standout defining demographic differences. Instead, the more likely indicators of ad blocking behavior are technical proficiency and concern over mobile user experience or privacy.

So why are people installing ad blocking apps on their smartphones?

User Experience and Performance

A common fallacy about people who block ads is that they are paranoid about advertising, privacy, and being tracked. For a significant percentage of people, that’s not the case at all.

For them, it’s much more about user experience:

“I enabled ad-blocking more for performance than privacy concerns,” Christopher Caen, editor-in-chief of ReadWriteWeb, told me recently. “Once I checked a mobile website I was at, and it was making 42 separate calls to ad-tracking and delivering services.”

All those calls take time, and take data. When the New York Times studied this in late 2015, one example mobile site took 33 seconds to load without an ad blocker, and only 7 seconds to load with one enabled. That’s a significant performance jump.

Privacy

Author

Before acting as a mobile economist for TUNE, John built the VB Insight research team at VentureBeat and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In addition, he led technical teams, built social sites and mobile apps, and consulted on mobile, social, and IoT. In 2014, he was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers." John lives in British Columbia, Canada with his family, where he coaches baseball and hockey, though not at the same time.