Dive Brief:

• According to Adblock Plus' parent company Eyeo, the ad block tech company is about to hit one billion downloads and has been installed on more than 100 million active devices.
• These numbers, presented by Eyeo Co-Founder and CEO Till Faida at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, compare to the 500 million downloads and 50 million active users Adblock Plus had at the start of 2016.
• Adblock Plus’ mobile app came out last fall, but it isn’t the key driver of downloads. According to TechCrunch, iOS and Android apps only account for just more than 10 million downloads.

Dive Insight:

Ad blocking technology has become a major, ongoing news item for months and only seems to be picking up steam. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has been directly addressing the challenge, publishers are struggling to find a workable strategy that helps protect their ad revenue, and the digital advertising industry as a whole has yet to come up with – much less put into action – a unified plan that effectively deals with the adoption of ad block software.

And clearly that lack of definitive action is not a move that consumers are willing to wait for given the increase of ad block tech adoption. Hearing that Adblock Plus, one software product that has been called out by name by the head of IAB, is about to reach the one billion download milestone should concern the digital ad world.

“We’re in this mess because the IAB has failed to create an advertising ecosystem that is sustainable and healthy,” Faida told the TechCrunch Disrupt audience. “What we’re all about is empowering our users to have control over their browsing experience.”

As the battle becomes more heated, what most parties can agree on is that the user experience is central to the debate and will be key in finding a solution.

"We have to evolve business models on the web and we have to put users in the center of that model," Faida said. This call-to-action echoes, ironically, the one that the IAB is proposing through it's LEAN advertising guidelines that call for marketers to revisit the type of ads they push out. Even Google is considering jumping into the debate with an "acceptable ads" policy.

If the wakeup call still hasn’t happened for the ad community, maybe Adblock Plus hitting this new benchmark will do the trick.