As you look to monetize your app or mobile site with ads, it’s important to understand what mobile ad blockers are and how they could impact your revenue.
I’ll be focusing here on mobile ad blocking, but you can read about desktop ad blocking here.
Ad monetization relies on ads being shown and tracked (and ideally seen and interacted with). Ad blockers prevent these ads from appearing (and tracking tools from working), preventing you from monetizing those mobile users during those sessions.
(The banner ad at top is blocked, leaving an empty space)
According to Blockthrough, mobile ad block usage rates are high - at 527 million, well above desktop's 236 million.
That will depend on a few factors:
Below outlines the different types of ad blocking tech.
One big difference between mobile and desktop ad blocking is that the latter relies on browser extensions - which are not applicable on mobile. Google Chrome, for instance, offers extensions on its desktop browser, but you can't download those same extensions for their phone or tablet browsers.
Apple's Safari captures 20-30% of the mobile browser market share and 44% of tablets. Apple allows users to download content blocker apps from the App Store, such as eyeo's Adblock Plus (which is the most-common desktop ad blocker).
Upon downloading, users then have to go to their Safari settings and enable the ad blocker to work.
Before Safari then renders the page, these apps tell the browser what requests should be blocked.
To identify what to block, most of these apps pull from the same regex list, called EasyList, which contains thousands of expressions like:
EasyList is maintained through a user community that identifies unblocked content, which is reviewed and potentially added to the list.
These apps do not appear to block custom native ad units, such as Twitter's Promoted Trends, Google's Search Results Ads, and so on. This is compared to desktop ad blockers, which are able to block such native ads, as they do both HTTPS request blocking and hiding of specific CSS elements.
Most mobile browsers beyond Chrome do offer some sort of built-in ad blocker, whether that's by default, such as UC Browser and Brave, or by opt-in, like Firefox and Microsoft Edge. These account for approximately 10%-20% of total mobile web traffic.
These browsers exist as apps that you can download from the Google Play Store, iOS App Store, and so on.
For browsers where ad blocking isn't enabled by default, like for Firefox, opting-in is easy (granted, FireFox does have Firefox Focus, a separate browser with ad-blocking on by default):
These built-in ad blockers appear to all use the HTTPS method that Safari content blockers do - which means they'll stop ads from third-party ad vendors, but will still show custom, native ad units.
In terms of what block list the browsers are using, it's a mixed bag. Opera, for instance, uses EasyList by default, while Brave is a proprietary list.
VPN (virtual private network) ad blockers work through VPN clients. They block ads by stopping or redirecting DNS (domain name system) requests to ad network servers. DNS ad blockers do the same, but require users to install them as their DNS server.
Like browser-based ad blockers, VPN ad blockers work by listening to and blocking any HTTPS requests from known ad vendors.
These solutions approach blocking ads from a couple of ways.
Connectify, for example, turns your computer into a hotspot that you can connect your mobile devices to and toggle off ads.
NordVPN is a VPN app that you download and have on in the background. Its "CyberSec" option lets you block ads and malware.
AdAway is a popular Android VPN tool that was removed from the Google Play Store, but can be downloaded by rooted phones and uses the hosts file.
Here’s a quick summary of the different types of mobile ad blocking tech:
The options for monetizing your mobile ad block users are limited (we have an extensive list of ideas for desktop ad block monetization here, though).
It's partly because many desktop approaches involve identifing, in real-time, who is using an ad blocker, then prompting them to turn it off or displaying different content.
That said, there is good news for companies worried about mobile ad blockers:
Still, below outlines some ideas you can take to minimize the impact of mobile ad blocking:
The Acceptable Ads program is a non-profit founded by eyeo, the creator of AdBlock Plus.
It’s a way for publishers to pay to have their ads whitelisted by certain ad blockers. Anyone with fewer than 10 million affected monthly impressions can join this program for free (assuming their ads are deemed acceptable), but for larger sites they charge a 30% cut of all incremental revenue gained from being whitelisted.
The upside of joining AA is being able to monetize users who have downloaded AdBlock Plus from the App Store or an AdBlock Plus app from the Google Play Store (or a similar ad blocker who is also in the program).
If your ad revenue is higher in your apps versus your mobile site (potentially caused by ad blockers), then you could prompt anyone on a mobile device or tablet to open the page in the app instead. This is the approach Reddit takes, as their mobile site repeatedly pushes people to read the thread in the app, not the browser.
Mobile ad blockers block pre-identified HTTPS requests that correspond with a known ad vendor. If you were to build your own ad product - like LinkedIn, Amazon, and many others have - you would not have to worry about your ads being caught by mobile ad blockers.
As such, this path would be advised if you're finding mobile ad blocking is having a sizable impact on your revenue.
You can build such a platform yourself or use ad serving APIs to cut down the work from years to weeks.
The biggest takeaway here is that ad blocking on mobile is fragmented - by device, operating system, site versus apps, etc - and is much harder to address than it is on desktop, where 90%+ of ad blocking happens via browser extensions.
