Ad blocking experiment hasn’t affected Forbes readership

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer of Forbes, writes Wednesday that the business magazine’s experiment asking its online readers to turn off ad blockers hasn’t had any affect on the number of people consuming its content.

Dvorkin shared these numbers:

— Since Dec 17, 4 million desktop visitors, or 42.3% of those asked, have either disabled their blockers or whitelisted Forbes.com , gaining access to content and the ad-light experience. That means no Welcome ad, no video ads inserted between paragraphs and no interstitial ads between posts.

— With those blockers disabled, we delivered 63 million ad impressions that would have otherwise not been seen. The revenue generated by those ads is not immaterial, and would be a welcome addition to any editorial budget.

– In January, visitors who turned off blockers spent an average 149 seconds per session consuming written content. That compares with 117 seconds for visitors placed in a control group with their blockers still active and 92 seconds for non ad blocking readers. Average page views were 2.7 for visitors who turned blockers off, 2.2 for the control group and 1.9 for non blocker visitors. Bottom line: the time spent, engagement and demographics of those who turned off ad blockers make for a valuable audience for both journalists and marketers.

— Overall site traffic remains strong, too. It fact, we hit a record 76 million unique visitors in January, as measured by Google Analytics. That was up from 64 million in December, when the experiment was in effect for two weeks.

Read more here.