Ad blocker and privacy statistics, sourced and dated.

estimated annual ad-revenue impact from blocking

Industry estimates put the global ad revenue impact of ad blocking at roughly $54 billion per year, though the real figure depends heavily on which ads would have been viewed, clicked or remembered.

of YouTube ad-block users encountered anti-blocking prompts in 2024

Surveys of YouTube viewers using ad blockers found that around 60% saw a 'video player will be blocked' interstitial at least once during 2024.

ads the average person is exposed to per day

Industry estimates put daily ad exposure for an average connected adult at between 6,000 and 10,000 ads, counting digital, broadcast, packaging and out-of-home placements.

year-over-year increase in malvertising campaigns

Security vendors reported a 42% year-over-year jump in tracked malvertising campaigns, where legitimate ad networks deliver malicious payloads to unsuspecting users.

third-party trackers loaded by an average news article

A typical desktop visit to a major news site triggers around 32 third-party tracking requests before the article has finished loading.

of the top 1 million websites embed at least one Google tracker

Three quarters of the most-visited websites in the world load at least one Google-owned tracker (Analytics, AdSense, DoubleClick, reCAPTCHA, Tag Manager or Fonts).

of top sites load the Meta/Facebook Pixel

Roughly 30% of the top 1 million sites embed the Meta Pixel, which fires conversion and behavioural events back to Facebook regardless of whether the visitor has a Facebook account.

of internet users are concerned about online privacy

Nearly four in five internet users report being 'somewhat' or 'very' concerned about how companies use their personal data online.

publicly disclosed data breaches per year in the US alone

The Identity Theft Resource Center tracked more than 3,200 publicly disclosed US data breaches in the most recent year, exposing over 350 million records.

of internet users have used a VPN in the last month

GWI's global tracker puts active VPN usage at about 31% of internet users in any given month — a strong proxy for general privacy-tool literacy.

of the median page weight comes from ads and trackers

On a median ad-supported web page, ad creatives, ad SDKs and tracking scripts account for around 39% of total bytes transferred.

faster page loads with an ad blocker enabled

Independent benchmarks consistently show pages loading roughly 2.1× faster when a competent content blocker is active, measured as time to interactive on ad-supported sites.

of mobile data saved per user per month with blocking

Across a representative sample of mobile browsing sessions, enabling an ad and tracker blocker saves around 1.3 GB of cellular data per user per month.

battery drain from third-party scripts on mobile

Controlled tests show that loading ad-supported pages without a blocker increases battery drain by around 21% versus the same pages with trackers removed.

people use an ad blocker worldwide

Roughly 912 million internet users actively block ads on at least one device, making ad blocking one of the most widely-installed consumer privacy tools on the planet.

of ad-blocker users are on mobile devices

About one in three ad-blocker users runs the tool on a mobile device, with adoption highest in Asia-Pacific where mobile-first browsing dominates.

users impacted by Chrome's Manifest V3 transition

More than 100 million users of major content-blocking extensions on Chrome have been affected by the Manifest V3 transition, which removed APIs that some legacy blockers relied on.

of life the average EU user spends on cookie banners

Calculated across a typical 60-year browsing lifetime, the average EU internet user spends around 575 hours interacting with cookie consent banners.

of consent banners use dark patterns

An academic audit of the top EU websites found that around 65% of cookie consent flows use at least one dark pattern, most often visually demoting the 'Reject' button.

of cookies set on top sites are third-party

On the top 10k sites, about 62% of all cookies set during a default page load come from third-party domains, primarily advertising and analytics vendors.