They call it “dark traffic” - ads that are not seen by tech-savvy users who have excellent ad blockers.
Not surprised that its growing. The web is unusable without an ad blocker and its only getting worse, and will continue to get worse every month.
Millenials are killing the ad industry!
Good.
It would have to be millenials since Gen z exist almost entirely in the walled garden of a phone app.
Most people now a days don’t even use a desktop with a browser. I honestly expect that most of what they are “seeing” is just web scrapers for the LLM. Those are likely to “block” ads simply based on efficiency, since it shows down crawling.
Why would anyone use a desktop? That’s like a baby’s toy!
It honestly creeps me out that so many people don’t curate what they watch and just consume whatever ‘their feed’ puts in front of them.