Ad blocking software is becoming mainstream and rapidly upending the web – but secret multi-million dollar deals mean Google, Apple and Microsoft remain immune.

Ad blockers are small pieces of software that do pretty much what their name implies: they block display ads on the web, making for a cleaner and faster web browsing experience.

For a long time they have been solely the province of early-adopters. But they are increasingly being used by average users, with very serious implications for web commerce.

More than a million Australians are active users of Adblock Plus, the most popular technology on the market, according to the company's figures. There are about 13 million internet users in Australia according to ABS stats.

Worldwide, an Adobe report in early 2014 found almost 5 per cent of web users, 144 million people, were actively using ad blocking software, up almost 70 per cent from the previous 12 months. In some places in Europe, like Poland, ad blocking is already used by a quarter of the web-browsing population, the report says.

That amounts to a lot of people not seeing advertisements.

"When this amount of people vote with their mice to avoid bad ads, it's clearly a wake-up call to the industry," says ABP's German-based spokesman Ben Williams.

Mr Williams calls the current online advertising system "broken", and believes his app will eventually force industry players to change.

"It's good for the Internet, because it's an innovative force that will lead us out of the broken online advertising scene.

"Newspapers have unfortunately suffered ever since the bottom fell out on advertising online. This led to more ads that were more aggressive and intrusive, and this in turn has driven the growth of Adblock Plus."

The saviour is mobile, where Google's Android software has disabled ad blocking technology. But Apple plans to allow ad blocking in the next release of its iPhone software, which may ramp up pressure on Google to do the same.

That's going to be a real watershed moment for ad blockers, fears Matt Rosich, general manager at Australian web advertising firm Audience360.

"Adblock is growing. It's still a relatively minor player. Safari is going to change things."

Mr Rosich tips growth in adblocker use will push advertisers into streams that can't easily be blocked – like Facebook and Twitter adverts.

"What that'll do for the user experience, who knows. The industry's not going to go away. It finds a way. All it'll do is change where the ads appear."

But the Interactive Advertising Bureau's CEO Alice Matters says her members – which includes Fairfax Media – aren't seeing adblock numbers at concerning levels yet.

"It wasn't at that time seen as a burning issue for the Australian marketplace, but obviously with the trends of what's happening elsewhere it's something on the watchlist."

"Ad blockers should not be necessary if the publishers are properly protecting the user experience. We currently protect it by having things such as frequency caps – so you only see it a number of times. There's a lot that publishers are already doing to ensure that there isn't intrusion into the viewer's experience."

It was revealed earlier this year several huge web companies had signed a deal with Adblock Plus's parent company to exempt their adverts from its program. Google, among others, is said to be offering a 30 per cent slice of the value of each advert ABP unblocks, a cash boon for the company.

"Adblocking has been around for a long time," a spokesman for Google told Fairfax Media.

" Of course, every day people around the world click on ads to find the products and services they want. Ads also help fund many free services on the web."