As usual, I use Google Surveys to run a weighted population survey. On 2019-03-16, I launched a n = 1000 one-question survey of all Americans with randomly reversed order, with the following results: […]
… I am however shocked by the percentage claiming to not know what an adblocker is: 72%! I had expected to get something more like 10–30%. As one learns reading surveys, a decent fraction of every population struggles with basic questions like whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa, so I would be shocked if they knew of ad blockers but I expected the remaining 50%, who are driving this puzzle of “why advertising avoidance but not adblock installation?”, to be a little more on the ball, and be aware of ad blockers but have some other reason to not install them (if only myopic laziness).
But that appears to not be the case. There are relatively few people who claim to be aware of ad blockers but not be using them, and those might just be mobile users whose browsers (specifically, Chrome, as Apple’s Safari/iOS permitted adblock extensions in 2015), forbid ad blockers.
(I highly recommend reading that entire section of the linked page, where gwern describes the results of several follow-up surveys he ran, and conclusions drawn from them.)
Note that many people don’t know about ad blockers:
(I highly recommend reading that entire section of the linked page, where gwern describes the results of several follow-up surveys he ran, and conclusions drawn from them.)