• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, May 10, 2016

Adblock Plus is on a tear. On Monday, it announced that it has more than 100 million active installations. That’s downloads from different users on multiple devices. This is a milestone because earlier in the year, the company said it had surpassed 500 million downloads with 50 million active users. What this means is that the active user base has most likely doubled since that time.

This is all the more reason why the industry needs an independent third party to gather, track and monitor data about ad blockers on a monthly basis. RTBlog called for this and at least one organization — BPA Worldwide — signaled its interest in this. Deliberate Digital is also interested. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has been conspicuously silent on the matter.

Meanwhile, Adblock Plus took a potshot at the Interactive Advertising Bureau: “We’re in this mess because the IAB has failed to create an advertising ecosystem that is sustainable and healthy,” Till Faida, CEO and co-Founder of Eyeo, AdBlock Plus’s parent company, said Monday at Tech Crunch’s Disrupt NY 2016 conference.

Adblock Plus’ whitelist program called Acceptable Ads allows certain advertisers through its screen. The company gets a cut of publishers’ revenues through that program.

The numbers don’t lie, although you can manipulate numbers to tell any story you want to. Either way, if these numbers are true, the need for some type of industrywide collaboration is more necessary than ever. A monthly tracking of ad blockers downloaded on a global basis would be a step in the right direction.