The Daily Mail loses more money to ad blocking annually than any other site in the UK, according to ad blocking analytics site AdBack. It leads a list of sites devoted largely to things guys like.
According to AdBack, ad blocking denies The Daily Mail nearly $22 million (£16.2 million) a year in revenues. It’s not alone among clickbait-heavy entertainment/news sites feeling the pinch from people’s desires to declutter their web browsing—sibling sites theladbible.com and thesportbible.com place second ($17.1 million; £12.7 million) and fifth ($5.6 million; £4.1 million), respectively.
Ladbible.com and thesportbible.com are sandwiched around Amazon.co.uk ($13.0 million; £9.6 million) and Yahoo.com ($6.3 million; £4.7 million). Video gaming and esports site Twitch and porn site Pornhub.com are also among the top 10 sites impacted by UK internet users’ ad blocking behavior.
Beyond Daily Mail, upper tier media brands don’t appear until the bottom half of the top 20, led by the BBC (11th) with losses of nearly $2.2 million (£1.6 million), followed by newspaper sites The Telegraph (15), The Independent (17) and The Guardian (18) with losses of $2 million (£1.5 million) or less.
To obtain its ranking, AdBack calculates lost revenues based on a formula that assumes an average CPM of 42 cents (31 pence) based on AppNexus data, multiplied by the number of blocked items per page, the number of page views a site receives each month according to Alexa data, and the ad blocking user rate of the country based on PageFair data.
All told, losses attributed to ad blocking in the UK for the top 20 sites were lower on average than for the top sites in Germany, but higher than those in France, Italy or Spain.
According to AudienceProject, 26% of UK internet users employed desktop ad blockers as of Q3 2016, while just 2% did so on their smartphones.
The UK’s rate was slightly below average for Europe, according to a Q3 2016 study by GlobalWebIndex that found 37% of the region’s desktop users and 17% of its mobile users had employed ad blocking software in the month prior to polling.
AdBack offers an analytics tool designed to study a website’s ad blocking visitors and craft customized messages and find alternative options such as surveys, videos or tutorials to help compensate a site for lost ad revenues.
—Cliff Annicelli