In 2016, we began a research project to determine the state of ad blocking in South Africa. There is a lot of data surrounding this in many Western countries, but surprisingly little for Africa and the Middle East. 

We began by trying to figure out how many people actually have ad blockers installed on either computers or mobile. As our company has a tracking code on websites, we developed one that wasn't yet tagged by ad blockers and had partnering websites temporarily install it. This way, if the new tag fired but the original didn't, we could identify that the user had an ad blocker installed. If both fired, then there was no ad blocker.

We ran this experiment for a couple of months at the end of 2016. Surprisingly, we found that 0% has ad blockers installed on mobile, and less than 10% had them installed on desktop.

Out of our 2,987 respondents, 13.22% were currently using an ad blocker. The above pie chart was created to insert into the research blog post.

Since the survey was heavily reliant on question logic, I designed the infographic in the form of a flowchart so that readers would have better context when reading responses.

The marketing department was extremely happy with the results of this report, as we now had some really solid insights to hand over to our advertiser clients. It also demonstrated that some of the respondents want to support local publishers, who are a major part of our clientele.