One of the most widely reproduced charts I’ve ever made is a super simple one showing all of the different ways that GA can be blocked (from my old article on GA blocking, circa 2017):

Who was blocking GA, back in 2017

I thought I’d do a short article on where this stands in 2024.

Yellow background is for items that block GA, red is for extensions that use the soon-to-be sunset Manifest V2 in Chrome.

Data from the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Addons.

This list contains about 250M users with blockers of some sort, and 129M of those that block GA by default. Most of the ones that don’t block GA out of the box make it quite easy to start blocking GA if the user wants to. Presumably the large majority of users simply stick with the defaults.

Beyond that list, there’s plenty of other ways that users may be blocking GA, including:

1. Safari or Firefox’s Private Browsing modes.
2. Adblockers that are stand-alone apps, e.g. 1Blocker for MacOS/iOS.
3. Adblockers integrated into mobile browsers, e.g. DuckDuckGo Private Browser.
4. DNS-based network-wide solutions, e.g. a Pi-hole.
5. VPN that come with blockers, e.g. NetShield from ProtonVPN.

These additional methods account for many additional millions of users. Nine years after I first started researching Google Analytics blockers, the ways in which GA can be blocked have certainly multiplied and become more complicated. Additionally the browsers themselves are now in the game in a way they weren’t back then.

David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s some of my observations:

While there are a lot more ways that GA is blocked, there’s still nothing that is what I’d consider totally mainstream. Despite fears and claims otherwise, Safari doesn’t block GA by default, and neither does AdBlock Plus. It’s also still more of an involved process to block GA on mobile than it is on desktop.

Brave has become one of the most popular ad-blocking mechanisms, likely second only to the AdBlock Plus family.

While EasyList/EasyPrivacy remains the most widely deployed source of block lists, a lot of the top-tier tools (Brave, uBlock, DDG, Ghostery) are also using their own lists.

Google is finally following through on killing Manifest V2, which will break uBlock Origin and other powerful blockers. Many blockers have already updated to Manifest V3 and sacrificed some functionality, but uBlock Origin hasn’t and instead have launched a new product uBlock Origin Lite which uses Manifest V3. This will leave around 50M users without a blocker. That’s a lot of users — but not enough to really change browser market share numbers, even if many of those 50M leave Chrome.

In July 2024 Firefox had 160M MAUs and Brave had 68M. I’m sure that either of those browsers would love to pick up some unhappy Chrome users, and they likely will.

With FF making up <3% of market share, even if Chrome lost that entire 50M (which they won’t) it’d only be a 1% or so from Chrome’s current 65%+ market share. Manifest V2 deprecation is not a game-changer.

Ad-blockers remain the most popular browser plugins. For example in Firefox, ad-blockers are numbers 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9 out of the top 10 plugins in the US, installed by 30% of all users.

While lots of industry and privacy people care about trackers, it’s remains the ad blocking itself that moves the masses. I added the “Adblock for Youtube” to this list for that reason, since its 9M user install base places it well ahead of more well-known industry favorites as Ghostery or Privacy Badger.

Since fall of 2023, YouTube has been much more aggressively fighting adblockers. That the biggest blockers like AB/ABP and uBlock Origin were failing to block YouTube ads seems have led to a decrease in the use of those blockers and an increase in extensions like the aforementioned Adblock for Youtube. In particular AB/ABP lost 19M Chrome users from Nov 2023 to Aug 2024.

The Adblock space remains a confusing, sketchy mess. There’s lots of plugins with copycat names and not many trusted vendors. For example “uBlock Origin” is the real plugin but “uBlock” is unrelated, and actually owned by Eyeo (the same people that make AdBlock Plus). Eyeo also now owns the “AdBlock” plugin, which was totally historically separate from ABP.

I don’t want to beat up whoever made this plugin, but 9M people gave this full access to their browser?

Many users just click “install” before doing any real checking. For example, Adblock for Youtube has no website listed on the Chrome Web Store and no real privacy policy (it’s just some boilerplate about GA). Looking at the warnings and source code via the CRXcavator plugin security tool don’t show anything obviously malicious, but it is a bit disconcerting to see 9M people install something that lacking basic trust signals.

That’s before we even start talking about all the plugins that are actually malicious, like the ring of 295 adblock extensions with 80M total installs busted in 2020.

What does this all mean for all of us running GA on our sites? It means that a lot of data is probably missing due to blockers, but how much will vary greatly depending upon your demographic. That part of the story hasn’t changed at all since 2015!

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on LinkedIn