Why do ad blocking extensions/add-ons exist?

We all know that some advertisements on websites can be super annoying! Nobody likes when you are happily surfing the web and before you know it there are three pop-ups open and sounds coming from somewhere you can't find.

To counter this trend there have been many ad blocking extensions/add-ons (referred to as only extensions for the rest of the training) created for all major internet browsers. Google Chrome alone has 50+ ad-blocking extensions in its web store.

What do these extensions do?

I'm not an expert on complicated internet code; however, most ad blocking extensions use a series of filters that work behind the scenes to determine what is "good" and what is "bad". If something is determined to be "bad" the extension will block it from downloading into your browser and prevent you from seeing it.

These ad blocking extensions will block just about anything that is sourced from an exterior domain to the one you are currently browsing. This means that they will block any paid advertisements on web pages from Facebook to YouTube and even your very own site. Most of them also block malware and other malicious software.

However, what is most relevant to us is that many of these extensions will blockAmazon widgets and banner links from your affiliate sites!

How many people are using these ad blocking extensions?

Let's look at some numbers and do some rough math to see just how prevalent ad blocking extensions are. Let's look at some of the most popular browsers:

• Google Chrome - There are two primary ad blocking extensions for Google Chrome: AdBlock and AdBlock Plus. Both of these have 10,000,000+ active users each. Given this, we know that there are between 20,000,000-200,000,000 Google Chrome users using an ad blocking extension! (The reason for such a wide range is that Google doesn't update it's numbers again until an extension reaches 100,000,000 users. Therefore, we know that each one of these extensions has somewhere between ten-million and one-hundred-million users.)
• Firefox - The top five most popular ad blocking extensions in Firefox have a combined user total of over 22,000,000!
• Safari - Apple doesn't release its user numbers as far as I could find. But AdBlock for Safari is the number one most popular extension in the Safari Extensions Store. Therefore, I think it's safe to say there are tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Safari users using ad blocking extensions.

Between these three browsers alone (I was unable to find any numbers for Internet Explorer), I think we can safely conclude that there are, literally, hundreds of millions of people using ad blocking software.

Now, I know the internet has billions of users; however, a few hundred million people is still a rather large chunk of the internet pie!

Continue to the next page of this tutorial to see exactly what these extensions might be doing to your website!