Now it is understood that when I click on an ad for a widget and buy the widget it is easy to tell. However if I see an ad for a widget, and next week buy that widget the ad probably worked even though it is muck harder find a cause/effect relationship.
Thus we need to keep reminding people that clicks are rarely the point of ads. The point is the sale. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, park benches, bill boards (and many more) all have advertisements. The people who place those ads believe they drive sales long term - and they have statistical data to back that up. All of that data came without a single click.
"Adblock users in the US are 1.5x as likely to have a bachelor’s degree than the average American adult, increasing to 3x as likely among 18-24 year olds. Pronounced adblock usage among college-age respondents points to campuses as a major vector for adblock adoption."
Personally, I think being online without ad-blockers, VPN, and AV is like having public, unprotected sex with strangers.
- Ad-blocker users skew young and wealthy.[1] The developer community as a whole also skews young and wealthy.
- If you are aware of the existence of ad-blocking technology, you probably use it.[2]
- Via comparison with other sites, you can also make some extrapolations. Take IGN - not a perfect proxy, but a reasonable one, with a core audience that is probably fairly demographically similar to the core audience for most developer-oriented sites. Approximately 40% of their traffic was using ad-blockers in 2015.[3] A Wired statement posted in 2016 has 20% of their traffic using ad-blockers.[4]
- Anecdotal evidence: every dev I've worked with has at least one ad-blocker installed. The vast majority of dev-adjacent people I've worked with - PMs, technical writers, designers - have ad-blockers installed.
Put it together and I think it makes a fairly compelling case that techies are the last audience on earth you'd want to orient your online marketing towards. I used to hope that something like The Deck[5], which was explicitly targeted towards "web, design & creative professionals", would be a good solution to this, and I even permitted their ads on Metafilter, but they shut down last year, presumably because they just weren't making enough money. They did everything that people claimed they wanted: the ads were unobtrusive, mostly text and optimized images, they didn't engage in tracking, they didn't sell user data (as far as I know), and they still couldn't make it work.
1. https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among-key... people-and-high-earners-143546
2. https://digiday.com/media/survey-80-percent-know-ad-blocking...
3. http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad-blo...
4. https://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocki...
Your first link messes up though. Seems to be the correct link, but got cut off somehow. In case you don't or can't correct it anymore, it's: https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among-key...
