#AdBlockers may be good for you, but spell detrimental affects on #publishing industry entities. - http://clapway.com/2015/08/11/publishers-say-that-a-rise-in-ad-blocking-software-is-costing-them-billions-242/

People who use ad blocking extensions in their web browser do so because they believe it brings them a sense of peace and relief not typically found in normal browsing capacity. In the early days of the web, annoying ad pop-ups often hindered a user’s browsing experience, and while ads have grown to be a lot less intrusive, there are still a good number of advertisers who don’t follow good advertising etiquette.

PageFair and Adobe published a report on Monday that showed that usage of ad blocking software has grown 41 percent worldwide. The total number of active users hovers right around 198 million every month.

Ad Blocking Software Climbs to 198 Million Users

According to Business Insider, the 198 million consumers using ad blocking software only account for about 6 percent of the entire population of the web. However, publishers are expecting to lose at least $21.8 billion in 2015 alone, and that number is predicted to climb up to $41.4 billion by 2016, according to Adobe and PageFair.

Now, these numbers aren’t really fair to quote because it isn’t costing publishers any money to not run advertisements; these massive numbers are purely figurative, which is an important distinction to make.

One graph published in the report illustrates that the growth of ad blocking software really didn’t change much until 2013. From July 2009 to June 2013 the user base grew from 21 million users to 54 million. But from July 2013 to January 2015 the user base exploded from 54 million to 181 million.

Ad Blocking Has Gone Mainstream

Ad blocking software is usually tied to a browser extensions – there is very few ad blocking software that is standalone – so the people behind the software usually aren’t advertising their product. That means that most of the new users probably heard about the software from word of mouth, or simply being fed up enough with ads to do their own research.

Most ad blocking software is developed for desktops and laptops since mobile users need to be jailbroken (iPhones) or rooted (Android phones). But a new change in Apple’s development practices will soon change the playing field for mobile devices. Business Insider also stated that Apple’s Safari browser makes up about 52 percent of all mobile browsing, and features in iOS9 will enable software developers to create ad blocking software, whereas they previously haven’t been able to. Android commands a majority of the market, but is developed by Google, an advertising giant. Google has already removed ad blocking software from the Play Store, so it will be interesting to see if Google announces anything similar for the Android platform.

Users Are Fed Up with Ads

In Adobe and PageFair’s report, they surveyed 400 people in the US about why they have started using ad blocking software. According to them, many users don’t trust the way advertisers and publishers handle their personal information. Younger people believed that there has been an increase in the number of ads shown online, and noted that as the primary reason they’ve began to use ad blockers.

Many ad blockers don’t block all advertisements, however. Non-intrusive ads are usually whitelisted by default, though users can manually choose to block ads on a page with certain software.

Do you use ad blocking software? Let us know in the comments!

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Publishers Say That a Rise in Ad Blocking Software Is Costing Them Billions

Another exciting kind of #space by #Moleskine. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/05/expo2015-in-milan-moleskine-is-the-future-of-human-space-123/

Artists, designers, futurists and even the eminent First Lady Michelle Obama assembled en masse to Milan this summer to experience EXPO2015, an exposition introducing the sublime dreams of how we will use space in the future, comprised of over 100 pavilions with a cultural acuity spanning the world. It debuts a future whose space reflects the progress of an increasingly globalized human identity, sans national and ethnic divides.

With a list of attendees whose reputation nearly renders Obama’s quotidian, those of us too busy to make it may have missed something spectacular. But fear not, for Milan-based Moleskine invited a dollop of architects, designers, illustrators and drawing enthusiasts to sketch the Expo pavilions in addition to Milan’s beautiful landmarks, for an architectural point of reference.

Designed with Adobe, the Moleskine Smart Notebook sketches were uploaded in real-time for the rest of us to fest in tense with this artistic vision, giving us a future lens of our own. Let’s have a look!

CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

The Italian Pavilion is sketched by Misiadesi. Its entrance curves into space straight out of Kubrick’s vision of the future. Resembling a spacecraft visiting for the day, is at once an echo on the 1960’s drive to expand human perception, to grasp the world firmly, by the joints, snugly interfacing the best of humanity with nature’s uncanny wonders. But inside, we see a reflection of how this drive to interface with the world alters our own structure in the jagged walkways, layered pylons and redundant superstructures that come together perhaps to critique the aesthetic worth of pragmatism.

ÉLAN VITAL

Emilie Romano’s Moleskine drawings of the Nepal Pavilion screams vitality from the far reaches of time. Inverted square pyramids supporting more pyramids rising into the sky in shrinking succession to a singularity exclaimed by King Kong’s war cry. This part asian, part sub-continental expressionist rendering seems to limn a cryptobiologic–a logic of life from a time before history, before time was time and life was perhaps more vital, and un-quantifiable.

HUMAN COMMUNION

In Christiana Donzelli’s Moleskine depiction, Uraguay’s Pavilion gives us our first taste of human life. Long arching pergolas shade an amalgam of homonids collecting around what could be a town well. Massive pylons stretch into the sky at relaxed acute angles, bringing focus to the megalith which reads the name of the nation on wood in the midst of human bustle and excitement.

DESERT EXPEDITION

The Angola Pavilion feels perhaps erected in a desert, as if Burning Man were a cultivated architecture of its own. A long passageway, possibly 20 by 30 meters, and a city block deep, is shaded by alternating loose wire frame canopy, allowing the thin human forms below to walk over the group’s newest find: a wave rising out of the ground, giving explorers a better view of this spacious oasis. Christian Gerasolo just gave this writer a dream to look forward to.

GLOBALIZATION

The Belgium Pavilion, sketched to beautiful detail by Misia Design’s adept use of Moleskine, reflects something of a more self-conscious cosmopolitanism, bringing together disparate uses of space into one block; a restaurant is crammed behind a Belgian Fries fast food store. Canopies and giant umbrellas shade humans discussing themselves over coffee and snacks. The aqueduct of the future rises out of the far left in nine pipes which turn down back to the planet in discontinuous shifts, creating an arch. Behind glows a blue superstructure, rising up to support a massive canopy, a sail really, a sail pointed up at the sky, carrying this space up into the future. Behind, in the distance, is a silver skyscraper, reminiscent of the twin towers, watching things develop from afar, both behind and ahead of us all.

MEGALITHIC COMMERCE

Caffe Cluster, a massive space enclosed by wooden planks rising more than 30 feet to the ceiling. A single yellow stripe, one meter tall carries pertinent information across the space for people to study and note below, perhaps for coffee, perhaps for what one could hypothesize is happening here: the transiting material of human business; goods exchanged for projects transporting human interests and speculation into the creation of new spaces, into the future.

HUMAN SOCIETY

Andrea Battistoni renders the dualism inherent in architecture clear. On the left we see the hustle and bustle of transiting persons of varying professions, age and class. Some converse, others wait, while one baby carriage rests unattended in front of a man, perhaps homeless, rests equally unattended against the edge of the central structure, which appears constructed of thin, overlapping planks. Conscious of this sea-worthy effect, around the corner are three levels of red doors, all open to human activity. A single human face nearest our vantage is mid-double-take, turning back perhaps to view the space as its represented on the right of the image; sans humans, sans color; the central structure rests mysterious.

ARCHITECTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Daniela Tediosi’s Caffe Cluster seems to limn something of human consciousness in view of new space. A short yet tall hallway is decorated with paintings. One features an exhausted boy resting against a wall with one leg out, clamping his eyes shut. At bottom, we see a man turning his attention to us in a multiplicity of overlapping outlines endemic of the paradox in generating space, that it flows forward, turning away and back at itself, its innate difference from itself folding outward into time.

GAZE OF CIVILIZATION

Arianna Franchi’s rendition of architecture shows us that Moleskine can also be endearingly modern. The same space displayed by Battistoni’s sketch is displayed again in black and white. The central wooden structure’s doors are not all ajar here, but the ones that are contain some stockpiled material. Pairs of legless human figures stand around in noir style, speculating below giant rectangular screens which hang from above. In the center of the ceiling hangs a globe, perhaps to show that this too is under the gaze of the Earth; a panopticon to human life.

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Moleskine is a classic for sure. Check their travel notebook out on Clapway Trends:

Expo2015 in Milan: Moleskine is The Future of Human Space