The Cost of Ad Blocking

To be perfectly honest, this is more an exercise in playing with Squarespace's chart plugin than anything else, but I thought the growth of the Adobe/Pagefair figures for ad blocking and their "cost" to the industry seemed pretty high. So I stuck them into Excel to see where the pattern was going (just a simple best-fit analysis, nothing clever). At their current estimates, it looks like the "blocked" revenue will be bigger than the whole online advertising industry.

Ad Blocking vs Ad Spend

All figures in $US billion, (p) = Projected figures (polynomial)

The thing is, this "blocked revenue" number is actually kind of meaningless. If all ad blockers were turned off tomorrow, there wouldn't be any more advertising money coming in. Its missing the point of the problem for the sake of creating headline-friendly numbers.