My brother - who is not a programmer, but skilled enough to run Linux - has just started using adblock a couple days ago. We are in that other part of Europe.
My point is that adblock usage doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent as we assume - at work (where everybody has admin rights on their work machines) maybe 10% of the non technical users have it. The point that makes people install it seems to be youtube ads.
The growth isn't driven by technical people any more; it's normal people who've grown up using web browsers and who don't think twice about installing an extension on Chrome. You're correct through that it is spreading through word of mouth. You can get more on the pagefair blog.