Busting the blockers

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The creation in 2014 of a ‘mobile- friendly sidewalk’ – a 30m lane intended exclusively for people using their phones while walking – in the Chinese city of Chongqing was just one sign of the emergence of Asia’s mobile-first generation. For this cohort, primarily in their teens and twenties, the smartphone is their primary screen – seemingly upstaging the real world even when they’re on the move.  

This emergence of mobile has been reflected in the – albeit modestly – growing proportion of Asian marketing budgets being apportioned to mobile marketing. According to a Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Warc report, the number of marketers assigning more than 10% of their budgets to mobile rose from one in five in 2013 to one in three in 2015, while the share of advertisers spending more than a quarter of their budget on mobile rose from 5% in 2014 to 8% in 2015. Mobile budgets are expected to double by 2020.  

However, there is a blip on the horizon for marketers targeting Asian mobile users: mobile adblocking. A recent report by PageFair (a company that helps publishers circumvent ad blockers), said that at least 419m people worldwide are now blocking ads – a 90% increase in 12 months (this figure doesn’t include content-blocking apps, in-app adblockers or opt-in browser adblockers). The World Federation of Advertisers has warned that ad fraud globally could be worth $50bn a year by 2020.  

And the Asia Pacific region is contributing more than its fair share to this figure; while it represents 55% of global smartphone users, it accounts for 93% of adblocking browser use. Some 36% of smartphone users in the region are apparently using an adblocking browser. 

This is most prevalent in China, where 159m people use mobile adblocking browsers. In India, the figure is 122m, and in Indonesia, 38m.  

According to PageFair, adblocking browsers improve page speed and reduce bandwidth consumption on mobile. This means that they help conserve data and make websites load faster – a key reason for their adoption in markets where mobile data infrastructure is less developed and therefore slow and expensive, relative to income.  

But while mobile adblocking is most prevalent in Asia, there is evidence of its growing popularity further afield.  

Research from GlobalWebIndex reveals that globally, more than one in three mobile users say they have used a mobile ad-blocking tool, with a further four in 10 expressing an interest to do so in the future.  

UK network operator Three confirmed in May this year that it would run a 24-hour trial of blocking adverts on mobile websites and in apps. In a statement on its website, the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau has expressed its disagreement with the move.  

“It’s a broad-brush approach that the largest media owners can probably survive but not the long tail of smaller ones,” said the IAB UK’s director of data and industry programmes, Steve Chester. “In the long term, consumers will also lose out, as they’ll likely have to pay for services that are currently free because they’re supported by advertising.”