Firefox: Adblock Plus lost millions of users in the past year
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/29/firefox-adblock-plus-lost-millions-of-users-in-the-past-year/
Adblock Plus is the most popular content blocking add-on for the
Mozilla Firefox web browser. In fact, it is the most popular
add-on for Firefox by a large margin.
Its more than 14 million users beat second placed uBlock Origin by
more than 10 million users right now. But things are not super
great if you take a look at how Adblock Plus' user count developed
over the past year.
A quick check reveals that the add-ons daily average user count
and daily downloads are down. An average of 21.4 million users
used Adblock Plus daily on September 29th, 2016. Additionally, the
add-on was downloaded 181,000 times on that day alone.
One year later, daily users are at 15.4 million on September 27th,
2017, and daily downloads at 89,000. That is a decrease of about
six million users in a year's time, and a drop in daily downloads
by 92,000 when compared to the stats a year ago.
https://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/adblock-plus-usage-stats.png
One could argue that Firefox usage may be down as well, and that
the drop in daily users and downloads is caused by that more than
anything else. But this would mean that other add-ons should see
similar drops in usage.
If you take a look at the uBlock Origin statistics, the second
most popular add-on on Mozilla AMO right now, and a content
blocker as well, you will notice that the add-ons stats are up.
On September 29th, 2016, uBlock Origin had about 1.5 million daily
users, and about 22,000 daily downloads. One year later, on
September 27th, 2017, those figures rose to 4.1 million daily
users and 55,000 daily downloads.
The add-on managed to more than double its user base and daily
downloads in a year's time.
https://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ublock-origin-stats.png
To be fair, uBlock Origin's daily downloads jumped shortly after
September 29th, and have actually dropped heavily at the end of
June and recovered only recently.
The huge uptick of downloads at the end of August seems to
correlate with the release of the WebExtensions versions of uBlock
Origin. Similarly, Adblock Plus managed to increase its daily
downloads at around the same time, but both download counts did
fall to previous levels shortly thereafter.
To come back to the initial question: why did Adblock Plus's daily
user number drop by several million users while similar
extensions did not see a drop but an increase instead?
Lets take a look at possible explanations:
Adblock Plus's Acceptable Ads program might be a reason. While
it is possible to disable the program in Adblock Plus, some users
may have had troubles doing so, or made the decision to move to
another content blocker instead.
Rise in popularity of uBlock Origin which may have had an
impact on Adblock Plus's performance. Interest in Adblock Plus
dropped slightly according to Google Trends, but uBlock Origin
interest increased only slightly however.
It is likely that uBlock Origin gained users who migrated from
Adblock Plus to the new extension, but this does not explain what
the remaining millions of users did. Could it be a change in
reporting on Mozilla AMO?
備註：
AdBlock Plus使用數從去年九月底的21.4M → 15.4M，
而uBlock Origin 1.5M → 4.1M
可能原因: 1. ABP的廣告允許計畫 2.因為uBlock Origin支援了WebExtension