Adblockers killing websites

Why do you believe that to be the case? Do you have something to indicate otherwise? Care to point at any authoritative references?

Care to point at any authoritative references?
Your “native” ads are still plain HTML. They’re contained in element, as soon as the IDs get wonky, they’ll start blocking entire domain names. De facto it’s already happening with Firefox.

Care to point at any authoritative references?
What about you? What makes your specific ads so immune to adblockers?

I’m just here to encourage the discussion - if members wish to assert a particular position, then they ought to reason beyond the statement of the position itself. Personally, I’ve no experience of advertising methods, native or otherwise.

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My position with one of my sites is that at least seeing the ads is what I require as payment for using that site. Each of the pages contains a code sample and a discussion of how that particular command and the code works. Anyone who blocks the ads from appearing also blocks the code from appearing. They can still read the discussion about the code but can’t see the code being discussed unless they also allow the ads to display. Those pages display simple text and image ads without any fancy animations or anything else to try to make the ads stand out. One of the main ad blocking services offered to add the site to their exception list if I would stop displaying image ads and only display text ones but I decided having all ad blockers block the code as well as the ads was a better solution than having one ad blocker not block the ads by default.

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Hi there Stephan,

I was just wondering whether your code examples
still disappear for those who use “addBlockers”
and have also sneakily disabled “JavaScript” ? :mask:

coothead

Disabling JavaScript causes ads on most sites to disappear as most ad services rely on JavaScript for them to work.

On the site I mentioned turning off JavaScript will kill the ads and leave the sample JavaScript code visible - it will however break all the working examples of that code. So either way, not allowing the ads to display makes the site a lot less useful for those trying to learn JavaScript than it is if they are prepared to accept a few ads.

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True, ad blockers are a real threat. But Stackoverflow for example, views blocked ads as “ignored” ads - therefore low-performing-types-that-hurt-your-campaign… other publishers have come up with workarounds to encourage people to disable ad blockers or give the publisher something in exchange (i.e. subscribe to email).

We think however, that ad blocking steers us to a game-changing direction. We can learn to love them.

Here’s a recent post we made: Should Publishers love Ad Blocking?

Ad Blocker really kills not only the website but especially the ad campaign. Currently studying new techniques on ad campaigns and looking forward on this exciting topic…

I know a lot of disabled people who need to disabled ads, because of how the ads do things like hijack their AT, screw with their navigation, and other things.

I don’t block ads myself actually, but somehow today this seems to mean “please track me, steal all my personal info and sell it in a big bucket with others, because I don’t care” which isn’t true, which makes me lean more and more towards using an adblocker.

If ads are to remain, they MUST become

  1. ethical
  2. accessible (or at least not block users from even using the page, which many do)
  3. secure. Currently lots of 3rd-party ad-injection schemes are big holes in a website. This is not cool, and Yet Another Reason for people to rightfully use adblocker even though they are benefitting from a website who uses those ads as revenue (and that’s kinda stealing in my view).
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I use an adblocker because the ads are never of any interest to me anyway, also some sites in the past have taken the piss in how many ads they tried to jam into a page. Sometimes with ads disabled i notice an slight increase in speed of page loading

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For me running an adblocker is necessary for many reasons:

  1. The sheer number of scripts that ads pull in on many sites slows my phone/tablet browser to a crawl, the result being pages that take 15-20 seconds just to render, jerky or impossible to scroll, pages that bounce you back to the top of the page to shove an ad in your face…

  2. Too many ads interfere with the reading process, how many times have you seen a video reveal and play when you’re half way through an article? That’s is rrrrrrrreally annoying, btw teads.tv is one of the culprits, they should be made to apologise to the world.

  3. Ads are irrelevant for me, if i want something I’ll specifically go shopping for it, not react to some blinking animated .gif.

  4. I don’t trust ads that follow me around. Ad tech is to blame here with their tracking/profiling. Case in point, a while back I was shopping around for a new phone on my iPad (which is just too old to support content blocker apps), I noticed ads for one phone supplier that I’d visited cropping up on nearly every site I visited, my reaction was “f**k you” for following me like a stalker. Funnily enough that phone supplier had a deal that I was considering, but due to them advertising at me like that I took my business elsewhere.

  5. Most sites don’t use any sort of editorial control over what 3rd party ads are displayed. That is really bad, and irresponsible.

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In some cases, where they are just too many or too irritating, maybe the ads themselves are killing the website, by creating a bad user experience. I hate those where you struggle to find the actual content among all the ads.
I know many rely on them for income or existence, but don’t over do it and don’t annoy your visitors. At the end of the day, that’s why ad-blocker exist, site owners and advertisers made this happen.

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In at least some cases the ads now go over the top BECAUSE of the ad blockers. Sites that got a reasonable income from a few unobtrusive ads before ad blockers now try to capture the same income from those who don’t use ad blockers by making the ads harder to ignore. The ad blockers have at least some responsibility for this - it isn’t just the advertisers and site owner’s fault.

What is really needed is ad blockers that will only block the over-the-top ads and still allow reasonable advertising to display. If ad blockers block too many ads then advertising will no longer be a way to pay for sites and the sites will all need to start charging their visitors directly.

One option some sites are already implementing is to allow people to either pay to view the site without ads or to see the site with ads and to not have to pay.

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I suppose the ad blockers stated a bit of an “arms race” with advertisers. Though it still holds that if ads were not annoying in the first place, ad blockers would not need to exist. Though I agree, it is unfair that the more responsible site owners with less obtrusive ads suffer due to the actions of the more trashy, OTT with ads, sites. I’m not pointing the finger at all sites with ads.
I don’t actually use an ad blocker, I just ignore ads, which on some sites is easier than others. Of course if any site is too annoying with it, I bounce.

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I just add them to the list of sites where JavaScript is off (the same as I do for sites where the JavaScript is broken). That often fixes things without needing an ad blocker. If the site is broken with JS off then I bounce.

I believe that sites like sitepoint and felgall’s suffer more than non-tech sites because they attract a more tech-savvy public. Most if not all of my non-ict friends wouldn’t even know what an add blocker is.

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I agree.

Of course, that’s only if any/all of the major browsers don’t eventually make ad-blocking a native feature.

Why would Google make ad blocking available native in Chrome when most of their income comes from the ads they display on millions of web sites? As they have the greatest share of the browser market and dominate search the idea of any browser introducing ad blocking as a native feature seems remote.

Identifying ad blocks and converting them into page blocks would be far easier if the blocking was native to the browser than it currently is. Any browser introducing it might easily find they have no web pages to display.

A lot of websites will probably start to require a registration to view the website content, still finding a workaround to allow the spiders to acces the pages in order to have them indexed in SERPs. But… is this okay? I mean, mine is just a prevision on how it will be in the future of the web…

You block ads? Then you don’t want to “pay for what you get”? Ok, registration required. = You can view the content.
You allow ads? Then you “pay for what you get”? Ok, no registration is required. = You can view the content.

Another option would be a protocol that really calculate the price of a domain, and lets the visitors to see how much it is worth. Something like: “You don’t have the necessary money to buy a drink here, sorry, you can’t enter”. LOL

Same situation for me. I’m earning € 0,01 per day. And I pay something like € 30,00 per month on hosting.

Ten years ago I was making two or three times the minimum payout every month. Now it can take up to six months to make the minimum. That’s over 90% pay cut and it still takes just as long if not longer to write new articles now as it did then.