“Is Ad Blocking 10% Higher Than Commonly Measured?”, 2018-04-10 (; backlinks):
A recent study by contentpass indicates that more than 25% of all ad blockers on desktop devices use the EasyPrivacy blocklist and are therefore invisible to common website analytics software…The by far most popular filter list to block ads is the so-called “Easylist”. It is activated by default in popular ad blockers like Adblock Plus, Adblock or uBlock Origin and focuses on blocking ads both on a network—and on a visual level. Even the built-in ad blocker of Google Chrome uses this list.
While EasyPrivacy users are now “invisible” to our service as well, we recently integrated our solution under the first party domain on a popular German IT news website. As a consequence of this first party integration the statistics about ad blocker usage were sent to a different URL, which was initially not being blocked by EasyPrivacy. It took about two weeks for the EasyPrivacy community to put the statistics URL of the first party domain on a filter list again.
These two weeks of unfiltered data allow us to get an idea of how many people use an ad blocker with EasyPrivacy activated (be it Adblock Plus/Adblock where the user manually activated EasyPrivacy or uBlock Origin where EasyPrivacy is activated by default).
Our data suggests that over 25% of all users with active ad blocking software on desktop devices use EasyPrivacy and are thus invisible to major web analytics software. In this specific case the true ad blocking rate on desktop was 37% while analytics software that is blocked by EasyPrivacy would only report what corresponds to 27% of ad blocking. Or from a different perspective: 10% of the total desktop traffic on this website is not analyzed and counted by common third party analytics software. Historical data from the time where our service was initially added to EasyPrivacy suggests similar proportions on other sites and verticals.