Ad-blocking software will account for $22 billion in lost advertising revenue this year, a 41 percent rise from 2014.
A report published by Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based start-up that helps advertisers thwart blockers, said one third of all Internet users now use some software to block ads.
Dozens of companies now make ad-blocking tools, which can detect online advertising and block the ads – many of which have already been paid for by advertisers. But not all the tools that block ads stop the underlying technology from collecting data about consumers.
The biggest users of ad-blocking tools are in Europe. In Greece and Poland, more 35 percent of Internet users have installed ad-blocking tools; in Germany, a quarter of users do.
But in the US, only 15 percent of users have downloaded these tools.