Solutions to revenue loss from Adblocking - for publishers

[MrX123]

Hi Guys,

Can you please share your views on how you would solve the adblocking problem for publishers?
The pros and cons of each solution you might offer.

Thank you very much! Really appreciate your time.


I am involved in the technology side of solutions to help publishers with loss of revenue from adblocking (fairly new..hence still learning )

 

[Hawker]

I've posted in quite a few threads on various webmaster forums over the years regarding dealing with the adblock issue.

The solutions have ranged from simply detecting adblock is used and putting a pop up to the user to simply denying them access to the site altogether.

IMHO the best way to deal with it is to use an adblock detection script and place a popup on the site which they can close or have to wait x seconds before they can close it reminding them that your site depends on ads to keep the site going.

You don't want to deny people access to your site just because they can't use it unless they have ads showing.

But you might be surprised of the amount of people that turn off ad disabling if you just polite ask them too in some way.

If your site is WordPress, there are some WordPress plugins that can do something like this.
Just search the plugin repo for them https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/adblock

There are ones that pop up a message to users asking them to unblock your site if they use the site more than x amount of times and can give them x amount of notices.

There are ones that replace the ads with a message also. But these are basically the same as the ones that disable AdBlocker and that is not the desired effect.

The one you want to use if any, is the one that shows a small site message (like an unobtrusive and easily closable popup).

Just Google "Show Message to AdBlock users" and you can find some novel ideas.

And some other useful resources I've used in the past

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869154/how-to-detect-adblock-on-my-website
http://www.labnol.org/internet/alternate-content-for-adblock/28602/

Good luck!

 

[MrT]

Hawker pretty much covered it.

One other thing though, even though your sidebar ads will likely be blocked no matter what, you can use image ads inside your content as long as it isn't an adsense script.

For example, if you want to promote your own course or book or affiliate product, that's fairly easy to do and won't get blocked.

 

[Hawker]

Yeah just make sure that script doesn't have the word "ad" in it anywhere. That's another way that adblocker blocks ads just by whether the word "ad" or ads" or "advert" etc appears anywhere in the code.

 

[MrT]

MrT

Yeah, I just tested this out on my blog.

I don't use adsense or major networks, just affiliate ads or ads to my own products. I'm using a mythemeshop template, so their widgets have a title like "300x250 mythemeshop ad" or something similar.

Using those built in widgets to serve ads, whether your own product or affiliate product, will cause the image to be blocked. However, using the "text" widget, you can avoid it being blocked.

Once you use the text widget to add your image ads, you may want to change the URL of the image to avoid it getting blocked. As long as you're not naming your image something "ad-y" lol you should be okay... for now.

 

[Equady]

Actually, I've turned off my ad-block altogether in some sort of solidarity.

Sometimes when I feel generous I click on the ads, not just for the heck of it but because I genuinely like the website itself.

So if your website is great, I mean REALLY great, I bet that you can "politely ask visitors to take off their shoes before entering." :friends:

As already mention above.

 

[olga_mir]

Did anyone try re-direct plug-ins for WP to avoid ad-block?
example redirection

 

[Rob Whisonant]

I moved to only using in context advertising and native ads. Have not seen an ad blocker ever block any of them.