Gladly, the company behind the Goodblock ad-blocker ran a survey recently, asking their users why they choose to block ads and where. Know what they learned? 77% of Goodblock users felt bad about blocking ads. Furthermore over 40% of Goodblock users had 5+ websites whitelisted. Two rather high numbers that prove that people truly do understand that online publishers and webmasters need online advertising to be able to survive.
Anyone truly interested in the ad-blocking debate should check out the full survey report from Gladly here. I also embedded a copy of it at the bottom of this post. The full report shows that the majority of people are choosing to block ads to fix a visual problem. Websites that bombard you with ads and popups every 30 seconds create a significant user experience problem and people don’t want to deal with it.
That being said, where do you fall in the ad-blocking debate? Do you feel guilty?