Support capabilities of ad-blocking in Safari could deal a severe blow to the online advertising market: a study of PageFair Adobe and shows the size of the problem.
Among the changes included in iOS 9, the mobile operating system from Apple that will be released in the autumn, there is the ad-blocking feature that will allow users to block natively in Safari advertising content. It is a feature that, according to a study by PageFair and Adobe, will prove to be a so-called ” game changer ” in an industry that already costs to publishers more than 20 billion dollars a year.
The number of Internet users that blocks advertising content grew significantly last year, according to the study of PageFair and Adobe, jumping 41% and counting just under 200 million active users worldwide. Growth is even more pronounced on the Mac platform, with 9 million users using Safari extensions of ad-blocking, 71% of the total.
Publishers accuse losses of 21.8 billion dollars in 2015 because of this habit, a value that could double in 2016 to over $ 41 billion. Until now, companies that depend on advertising on the web for their survival could somehow rely on mobile, where the practice of the ad-blocking is not as widespread and constitutes only 1.6% of the total of blocked content.
The advent of iOS 9, could change quickly the tables allowing users to more easily install ad-blocking extensions from the App Store. Says the report, ” Mobile Safari is the 52% market share of mobile browsing (and 14% of the total market of the web browser). With the support the ad-blocking in iOS9 we expect the trends of Safari are close to the levels observed with the mobile version of Firefox, equal to about 16%. ”
Apple will not have the lock on iOS 9 by default but allow developers to program applications that allow the browser not to play specific content of the page, whether they are images, scripts, cookies and any other type of code. In addition to the advertising measures they could then be used to neutralize the operation of the script tracking, another headache for advertisers and advertising agencies online.