Announcing AAX’s New Forthcoming Study!

We know people in the USA are blocking ads.

And we know who they are: ad filterers, the affluent, well-educated, and engaged 95% of users that choose to run an ad blocker but have consented to see ads like the unobtrusive, respectful forms of advertisement known as “Acceptable Ads”—ones that fit the criteria set forth by the independent Acceptable Ads Committee.

AAX is devoted to knowing everything there is to know about ad filterers. In one previous study we looked into what makes this demographic unique, another study examined their purchasing habits, and our most recent study dug deep into ad filterer motivation: the reasons ad filterers avoid advertisements, and how and why those reasons change.

Our passion for all things ad filterer is why we’ve turned our attention to an issue that’s capturing everyone’s attention: ad filterers’ political profiles.

In other words: what party do American ad filterers’ affiliate themselves with? And beyond simple party distinctions:

• how do American ad filterers align with various political profiles?
• what roles do attributes like location, age, and education play?
• what are their stated values, and what adjectives do they feel describe them?

We consulted the trove of data that the GlobalWebIndex (GWI) keeps about internet behavior. This data is accumulated by actual users responding to questions, and GWI amends it on a frequent, rolling basis.

And we found out a lot.

American ad filterers—which GWI refers to as selective ad blocking users—are an eclectic bunch, and examining their political affiliation, their self-identified values, and the descriptors they feel best summarize them gave us a stunning amount of insight into this dynamic demographic.

In the service of looking at political profiles, we also got to revisit issues of location, age, and education—which we’d examined in previous years—and explore how demographics have shifted during the COVID era. All of the data we explore is from 2020 and 2021.

And we’ve used all these fascinating findings to compile a new study—American Ad Blocking Users’ Political Profile—available for free download in May 2022.