Pakistan among top countries when it comes to mobile ad blocking: report

Around 22 per cent of world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users are blocking ads on the mobile web

Pakistan is among the top countries using ad-blocking with 38 per cent of smartphone users having installed ad-blocking browsers on their devices, revealed a report published earlier this week.

According to “2016 Mobile Adblocking Report”, published by the pagefair.com, around 22 per cent of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users are blocking ads on the mobile web -- a 90 percent rise over the past year.



While there are twice as many mobile ad-blockers than desktop ad-blockers -- enabling 419 million people to block ads on their cellphones -- the report says mobile ad-blocking is most popular in emerging markets with 36% of smartphone users in Asia-Pacific using ad-blocking browsers.



In Pakistan, as many as 10 million smartphone users, which are almost 38 per cent of over all users, have installed ad-blocking browsers. The ratio of smartphone consumers using ad-blockers is even higher in India and Indonesia, with 61 and 66 per cent respectively. Meanwhile, China turns out to be the country with the highest number of ad-block users with 159 million active users, which is 31% of overall mobile phone subscribers in the country.

Although the Asia-Pacific region makes up 55% of the global smartphone users, the region constitutes 93 per cent of ad-blocking browser usage.



On a global level, from 198 million in January 2015, the number of ad-blocking browsers increased to 376 million in January 2016. The number even increased to 408 million by March 2016, making ad-blocking browsers most popular kind of ad-blocking in the world.

Explaining what’s driving the growth of ad-blocking browsers rapidly, the report claimed that these browsers not only improve page loading speed but also reduce bandwidth on mobile.



These numbers are likely to increase further, with device manufacturers pre-installing ad-blocking browsers with new smartphones. In Dec 2015, ASUS partnered with Adblock Plus to provide an adblocking browser on 30 million new handsets in 2016.



As opposed to a phenomenal growth in the Asia-Pacific region, ad-blockers have shown relatively low adoption in Western countries, likely due to more affordable mobile data costs. There were 14 million monthly active users of mobile ad-blocking browsers in Europe and North America.

The report also shows the drastic difference between android and iOS users. Despite the hype, content blocking apps on iOS have had only 4.5 million downloads, making a limited contribution to ad-blocking usage globally.