There is a tweet circulating right now, by a Twitter user named Ben Chase, that has clearly struck a chord. Though Chase has fewer than 900 followers, his tweet has garnered over 31,000 likes, nearly 16,000 retweets and more than 450 replies at the time of writing. His point that has resonated with so many others? The typical mobile reading experience is cluttered with distractions, from sharing buttons to “read more” links to, yes, ads.
I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles… pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w — Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017
Users are rebelling against publishers’ efforts to keep them engaged and monetized, and their go-to weapons are ad and content blockers. That’s worrisome for publishers, and for the internet giants that have a share of that ad business and those that have publisher content linked to from their platforms.
With mobile accounting for a bigger and bigger piece of the digital advertising pie, ad blocking on mobile is becoming a much bigger industry concern. With so many players and competing interests, it can be hard to keep track of who is doing what in regard to mobile ad blocking.
Here we take stock of how widespread usage is and the actions Apple, Google, Facebook and others are taking to address mobile ad blocking.
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