A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how to fight Ad-Blockers, so, in this post, we talk about why we do we care about fighting Ad-Blockers.
And why Banner Ads is not a sustainable model for bloggers and content creators.
If you look at this chart I exported from StatCounter. You will see that UC Browser is the most used browser on Mobile Phones. In fact, it has more than 50% market share in Mobile Web Browsers (54.25% to be exact).
On the second number, Opera, the market share is 18.45%. If you add both UC Browser and Opera Browser’s market share, it comes as 72.65%.
So, 72.65% of the Mobile users will not see your Ads. Here is why?
Both UC Browsers and Opera browser are popular among Android users who have low to mid-range Android devices, and use slow Internet data plans (2G). UC Browser and Opera, both promise to offer fast web and save a lot of data while browsing.
And they actually do it, but apart from making websites load fast, they go aggressive and block ads by default. Yes, they have inbuilt ad-blockers and they are enabled by default.
Most users don’t even realize the Ads are blocked, but that still affects the revenue of bloggers Like me, who rely on Ads.
For adding some more information on this, I pulled out some Google Analytics stats to see how much revenue I’ve made from the visitors who used UC Browser to visit my site.
And the results were pretty interesting.
I exported data from 1st Jan 2016 to September 23rd, 2016, for Revenue from UC Browser.
| Month | Sessions | AdSense Revenue |
| January | 9,460 | $0.56 |
| February | 10,234 | $1.13 |
| March | 9,072 | $0.92 |
| April | 6,900 | $0.32 |
| May | 8,842 | $0.41 |
| June | 12,435 | $0.46 |
| July | 15,693 | $1.26 |
| August | 12,055 | $0.47 |
| September | 9,161 | $0.14 |
| Total | 93,852 | $5.66 |
RPM = $0.06
and data from 1st Jan 2016 to September 23rd, 2016 for Revenue from Chrome Browser.
| Month | Sessions | AdSense Revenue |
| January | 49,593 | $59.59 |
| February | 73,770 | $115.56 |
| March | 44,389 | $70.64 |
| April | 31,321 | $39.87 |
| May | 37,521 | $50.18 |
| June | 46,413 | $48.76 |
| July | 53,168 | $47.32 |
| August | 41,725 | $54.85 |
| September | 38,060 | $40.12 |
| Total | 4,15,960 | $526.89 |
RPM = $1.27
Note: There are various other factors for a low RPM for UC Browser, but it is still a way too low.
If you want to check your blog stats, open Google Analytics, then go to Technology under Audience section, click on Browser & OS. This will show you the list of browsers, if UC Browser and Opera is anywhere near top 3, or the percentage is high, it is a matter of concern.
Click on the UC Browser and see the traffic in a certain time period (can set from top right)
Now, select another metric (see image above), Select Adsense Revenue. And you will see how much revenue you’ve made from the browser. You can then export this data from top left.
Note: This is the best way I could think of to compare the revenue, if you know a better way, please mention it in the comment section, I’ll update the article. Thanks.
Now, you can’t really do much about it. You cannot earn revenue by showing ads to Users who don’t want to see ads, But you still may want to notify them that they are harming your revenue,
Ad-sense theme from MyThemeShop, which has an Ad-Blocker detector, works in detecting Ad-Blocker in UC Browser so that the user can Disable it and continue browsing your site.
But that would be a short-term solution to stop Ad-Blockers in stealing our revenue.
For a long term, Bloggers need to find (or switch to) a better revenue model, like Affiliate Marketing, Native Advertisement, Promoted Content etc.
