• by Ben Frederick , Staff Writer @mp_benfred, September 24, 2015

Most mobile marketers will agree: Everyone hates mobile ads.

I submit for your consideration two pieces of evidence for this statement. On mobile, about 50% of ad clicks are accidental, and ad blockers have been leading sales in Apple’s App Store pretty much since the company announced it would be supporting those products.

Native ads do better, but a 52% lift in purchase intent doesn’t mean much when the numbers you’re talking about are miniscule.

If I were a marketer, I’d take a long look at those numbers and consider that perhaps there’s something fundamentally wrong with the business model of Internet content producers and the advertisers that support those publications.

The IAB is considering blocking the blockers, but that seems a little like "The Simpson'"s Principal Skinner asking himself, “Am I out of touch?” and coming to the conclusion, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.”

So far, there’s no such thing as a native or in-app ad blocker -- but if they existed I’d bet that those apps would also be topping the markets.,

In the short term, there is still a lot of money to be made in the mobile market. The International Technological University estimates that there will be 121 countries with mobile cellular penetration in excess of 100% by the end of 2015, and that by 2020, global mobile cellular subscriptions will have grown to 9.2 billion.

As the market size expands, advertising profits will also expand, but it’s not hard to see a day (coming sooner than most imagined was possible) when nearly every human on earth uses a mobile device. What happens when they all install ad blockers?

In the long term, marketers will have to seriously consider new digital ad formats that people actually want to look at.