AdBlock – The technology to block online advertisements introduced (back in 2009) with an ideal idea to block only intrusive ads have been advanced so much and become such evil that it now blocks almost every type of advertisements – Text Ad, Banner Ad, Pop-up, Pop-under, link units, etc. even if they are placed in non-intrusive way. And, available with such an ease of just installing their adblock extensions for Chrome, FireFox, Opera and other popular web browsers, they are being used so much by Internet users.
Internet users use these adblock extensions just to save few KB of their bandwidth, make internet a bit fast for them (as without advertisement scripts a webpage load comparatively fast) or just to remove a little distraction that advertisements put on webpage visitor’s eye.
But, it’s a big loss for website owners. They work day and night hard, serve quality content to visitors for free so that those visitors can earn them a little revenue by providing clicks, impressions and conversion rate on ads placed in their webpages. For most of the websites on Internet, a large portion of their revenue comes from clicks, impressions and conversion rate they receive by serving advertisements on their webpages. And, this ad-block technology is killing it.
Due to ad-blockers, websites are losing from 30% to 50% of their total revenue and these adblock users are rising faster than ever. PageFair’s Adblock users stat reported that there are now 198 million adblock users around the world with a growth rate of 41% in last 12 months which costed publishers nearly $22 billion in 2015. This is HUGE.
If advertisement is the main source of income for your blog also then obviously you too are facing loss of revenue due to Adblock users even if you don’t know or haven’t tracked it down yet. So here I am telling 10 effective ways to outsmart Adblock users and increase your website’s revenue through them.
Change Your Style
Internet is ever-changing. Nothing stay long in Internet if they’re not changing or adapting to new trends and changes which are going around the internet. Even before this ad-blocking technology was introduced, internet users were becoming banner-blind, they kept ignoring ad-banners consciously or subconsciously which was already resulting in consistently less conversion rate and effectiveness of banner advertisements.
Now when ad-blocking technology is making the situation even worse and among those who haven’t installed it yet, most people are already banner blind. So, accept this fact that the future of banner advertisement is not bright.
It’s time to change the style of making revenue from your website. Consider those ways of advertisements that adblockers cannot block like sponsored reviews, affiliate marketing, coupons/deals, referrals, shoutouts, etc. Even brands also like this because this mode of promotion provides them quality customers and very high conversion rate.
Ask Adblock Users Politely To Whitelist Your Website
You can detect adblock users by placing a fake ad-script on your webpages which if not found, will indicate an ad-block users. Once an adblock user is found, you can take a suitable action for him. Though in this method I am not telling you to take any violent action for such visitors but yeah, you can at least ask them to disable adblocker or whiltelist your website in their Adblocker extension.
If your blog is on WordPress, you can use Anti-AdBlock WordPress Plugin which allows you to display a notification message to visitors with AdBlock on either humbly asking them to turn it off or whitelist your website (like the way MakeUseOf did).
Manual Promotion
By using the Anti-AdBlock WordPress plugin that I provided you above, you can also place your custom promotions about giveaway/event you’re running on your blog (your own ads). You can also put newsletter subscription box to convert Adblock users in other way – by making them your permanent subscribers.
Direct Advertisement
As more and more ad networks are being added to adblocker database, all the popular ad networks are going to get blocked (if they aren’t yet). So, if banner advertisement is your necessity, they you should invite advertisers to directly place ads on your website rather than using ad networks like Google Adsense, BuySellAds, Adbrite, etc.
Placing advertiser’s banner with target link can be unsatisfying both for you and for your advertisers so, you can either use a good short URL service which allow tracking (for ex, Bit.ly) or use ad serving plugin like OIO Publisher.
Use Available Ad Networks
Getting direct advertisement can be tough at starting. So, if you can’t make a sudden shift from ad networks to custom advertisements, we recommend you to use those ad networks which are still not blocked by Adblock Plus and other Ad blockers. Yes, there are still few ad networks which are not blocked by Adblockers. Some of the popular ones are –
- Keywordblocks.com
- Media.net – Yahoo! Bing Contextual Ad Network
- Outbrain
- Taboola
You can either replace all your current ad slots from ad banners of these networks or serve them alternatively at the time when adblock users block your normal ads. To do this in WordPress, you can use plugin like Ad Injection which allows you to serve alternative content/ad for ad-blockers.
Ban / Redirect Adblock Users
If you’re feeling too violent, you can give rough response back to adblock users. The tit for tat way. Although I don’t recommend it because it is anti-consumerist but if you want, you can actually block adblock traffic to view your content either by banning them from visiting your website or redirecting to some other page, maybe a page where you are asking them to either unblock/whitelist your site in their adblocker or buy premium subscription.
To do this, put this HTML code anywhere inside your webpage content as it will act like a fake ad:
Now, add this JavaScript function at header, footer or just below the ad-code:
The above code will currently redirect your adblock users back to google.com, if you want to redirect them to some other page, just change the URL. And, if you just want to be polite and show a pop-up message, you can replace the line:
in the code with:
Use Adblockers-blockers and block content for Adblock users
You can block either your partial or full content for Adblock users and ask them to disable Adblock to read your full article. This is much better way you can deal ad-block traffic. This is how many big sites are asking dealing with adblock users. For this technique too, you are gonna use the above script. Just replace the redirection code with your solid-color filled div block or something else.
If you want a better script that cannot be easily tricked by smart users using Inspect Element feature, you can use Antiblock script. The script is more advance and cannot be bypassed by Adblock users.
Use anti-Adblock Ad Networks
With the rise of Adblock users and loss or advertisers and publishers, some ad networks fight back and released some impressive way to deal with them and serve advertisements even in Adblock users’ browser.
Secret Media
Secret Media developed a technology, based on polymorphic encryption to pass ads through AdBlockers, and to make sure that the AdBlockers are not able to identify these patterns code. And made it impossible for AdBlockers to create a systematic rule to identify the advertisement.
Uponit – Anti Adblock & Adblock Bypass
Uponit system detects ad-blocked traffic in real-time and allows the website to monetize this “unreachable” traffic as well. Using Uponit publishers immediately regain 15%-30% more inventory to sell, which is inventory that they were not accessible so far, allowing them to make more revenue out of adblock users on their website.
Convert Them Differently
Remember above how I told you to convert adblock visitors differently by serving custom advertisement or subscription box to them? Well, there is an automated script for that with much more feature, AdLatch.
AdLatch is the technology allows you to track adblock visitors and serve email subscription, social sharing option or donation/paywall button to them by adding its small 2-lines code to your website. AdLatch is free for sites with up to 1 mil visits/month. If you have more visitors than this digit, you can buy their premium plan which come with even more benefits.
Implement More Respectful Ad Models
On Internet, ads are considered by most of the Internet people as obnoxious so people try to ignore them. Intrusive advertisements have made this attitude of internet users against online advertisements that they now just want to avoid any type of advertisement but advertisements are necessary evil both for advertisers and publishers, so you can’t stop using them.
But what you can do is to provide more respectful ad model. Blend ads in your content so appropriately that rather than ignore, people will consider them as another important piece of content.
- How about a game which can only be played perfectly in VR headset? Your VR Ads scope here.
- How about tutorial to removing adware from computer permanently? Your Anti-adware ads scope here.
Remember how people avoid/ignore ads between TV shows but love to read them in magazines? Try to blend your ads up to such an extent that they will become necessity for your readers rather than something that they can blindly ignore. You can select categories for advertisements in Google Adsense and other Ad networks, right? Time to use that filter appropriately.
These are some of the most effectively ways I found to deal with adblock users on your website and convert them or still make money out of them. If you know any other way, please share it in comments section below.
