How We Detect Adblock
blog.pagefair.com
The tech behind the detection.
blog.pagefair.com
If you want me to turn off AdBlock, you need to insist on reasonable, non-offensive, non-animated ads. If your ad provider doesn't do that, get a better one, or lean on yours until they do. If this industry spent one-tenth as much energy pushing ad services for better quality standards as they do wringing their hands about ad blocking, shit would happen.
Edit: sounds like this is what reddit does. Props to them!
I believe they all used https://www.projectwonderful.com/ as their ad provider, by the way. I haven't really inspected them, but if you want inoffensive ads on your page, that might be a good place to start looking.
The HTTP DNT process at the W3C was supposed to fix this, but it got derailed by the DAA (the Digital Advertising Alliance).
You can manually stop this tracking with AdChoices. Click on that weird little blue icon that's in most ads, and you'll be able to disable tracking by DAA members.
Notably, AdChoices doesn't entirely prohibit tracking - I think you just need to be "minimized" to a certain extent. AdChoices is stupid, but it looks like we won't get a real solution in DNT unless something changes within the next month or so.
It seems to be very heavily used on webcomic sites I frequent, and I haven't seen a bad ad yet.
I also like the idea of purchasing time on a site, rather than using targeted ads. Meanwhile, the hosting site can discontinue the ad if they feel it doesn't match their culture.
It's more analogous to renting a billboard from a friendly business you like, rather than hiring a bunch of people to follow your customers around with posters.
It just seems like a stand-up way to do ads.
I, as a user, wouldn't be happy having to blacklist all sites.
I won't pay a monthly fee for most sites, because I read a little on a lot of sites - I don't mind paying a 1 penny per article fee if it is convinient.
I guess PageFair additionally lets you collect statistics on how many users are blocking ads, which may be useful.
The people who are savvy enough to use AdBlock (and I'm sorry for my condescension here, I really am) are generally not going to be the people who convert from a YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON WEIRD TRICKS advert. Generally.
So the point of stuff like this for most web devs should not be ultimately to circumvent AdBlock, or to try to encourage/guilty AdBlocker users into quitting, but to make sure that you don't count AdBlock views as ad views.
I'm not saying that's what the article is arguing, but it's the useful information web devs should take from the article in my opinion.
And of course running ads which are well-made and unintrusive should absolutely be the goal of any site owner who relies on ads for income.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/02/the_internets_next_victim_ad...
But yes, agree with your point if you are a ABP user.
Then they bought doubleclick and the animated display ads came right back...
They run those ads because they can't figure out how to more effectively monetize their traffic.
This was great for everyone. People who hate ads turned them off. People who don't care left them on, and they were unobtrusive. Some people liked the ads. (Yes, they clicked relevant ads, and bought stuff from the vendors.)
I have no idea how that can be expanded.
If your website requires a monetization scheme to exist, and you can't find a monetization scheme that doesn't pollute your product with (even nice simple) ads, that's not really my problem. I didn't force you to publish.
If I want your content, then I'd be happy to help pay for its generation. If it satisfies my terms, of course (open licensing, no ads).
I'm on a limited data plan here in Canada (unlimited plans are not common and very expensive). So I have adblock, very rarely visit the site and now refuse to buy a subscription.
(This does not require PageFair's services, BTW. Every site I've seen that does it has a text message under their ad panel, so if the ad doesn't load you see the message. Simple.)
The problem now is that advertisers have poisoned the well. It's hard to get people to change--that means it's hard to get them to install AdBlock in the first place, but it's also hard to get them to use their whitelist after installing it. Inoffensive ad vendors and users have an uphill battle to regain the trust of their users.
Unfortunately, the problem with this is:
1) Most sites try to make the best of both options. They put ads everywhere, which essentially makes them beholden to the advertiser and not the reader and then offer an option to give them some money instead of seeing ads. That only addresses "I don't want to see 10,000 ads every day" part. It doesn't address the "I want to be your focus - not your product that you deliver to your advertisers" part.
2) Why is it that when places offer a "support us with money" option, they are so ridiculously expensive? Instead of spamming my face with ads every day, give me an option where I can go ad-free for maybe $5 a year. Nobody does that, though. They say "you can see ads or you can pay us $50/yr". Seriously, you are not getting $50 in value from advertising to me in a year, so why are you jacking up the price ten times over just so I can go without the ads?!
Ultimately, none of this matters. Internet advertising is a joke and a scam and advertisers will slowly catch on. The whole "it's super targeted you guys!" thing really isn't turning out to be that valuable and it is all rampant with fake click-farms and other inherent problems.
Also, the only thing I hate more than a huge site throwing ads in my face for their content is when every little mommy-blogger or part-time ranter on the internet with a Blogger blog has to monetize their stuff. Look, you are not making a living at this. You are not ever going to make a living at this. Why would you do something so gross as to fill a page with advertising for those six people you might get each month who actually bother to read your site?
Do people not realize that there was a time when we did things online (or even back in the BBS days) for the joy of it? For the joy of making and maintaining systems and services? Or for the joy of having people read what we have to say or make use of services we have to offer? Not only didn't we expect to make money (much less a living) from it, we actually spent plenty of our own money.
But now, if you can't monetize something, it just isn't worth doing, I guess. Gross. And you'd rather advertise to me rather than just take a buck from me in a value-for-value trade. Double gross.
PS: I pay for or donate to a number of online services and websites from RDIO and GiantBomb to a couple torrent sites, charities, and chipping in a dollar or two when I find something really special on one site or another that I really particularly appreciated. I'm not cheap. I just don't want to stare at tens of thousands of ads for 8-12hrs a day every day of my life. And, ideally, I'd also rather be a customer than a product... which I guess depends on everyone else also wanting to be a customer, but they're too cheap and would rather just look at a page that is 70% ads than give a dollar now and then.
I have turned the non-obtrusive adblock option of, I don't want to see any ads ever.
There is a reason I don't want that - because ads are content that suck. Ads that don't suck are content - such as the funny videos I am watching.
I don't give a hoot if the site I am visiting goes down because it can't afford its bandwidth bills - there are plenty other sites.
Take the reddit approach: put a humanizing message kindly asking users to disable it and then don't make offensive/hostile ads. And then make some percentage of the ads a "thanks for whitelisting us, we really appreciate it" message.
It's nice that they're discussing these techniques, hopefully other sites will do it better. I browse with click-to-play for plugins and it's often mistaken for ad block.
Unfortunately for them many Adblock users also use Noscript or Javascript Blocker. Circumventing Adblock this way will just drive more people to prevent untrusted websites running code on their machines. A net win for web security but probably not the intended effect.
More and more sites are requiring JS to display content that could be served just fine (if not better) as a static document. I don't know how much of that is done with the intent of having control over the user, but I've witnessed at least one web developer admit to making JS non-optional because of an advertising contract -- the idea being that users will allow scripts on an all-or-nothing basis, so to view the site, they'll also run the ad scripts.
https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/noscript/ has 2MM users and https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/... has 17MM
IMHO, NoScript is too annoying to be practical for most users. It's not the sort of thing you can set it and forget it.
I have a comfy six figure IT job, and I'd still spend a few hours for fun just to figure out how to work around your javascript. Now think about how much time someone determined will spend on it.
Pivot and go do something with a higher possible success rate.
I'm not arguing that content distributors are killing their own biz with these techniques, however, the companies selling the tech are doing quite fine.
The more people hacking their products the better, if they have a client and the ad rate goes down, who do you think the client is going to call? And of course the client would love upgrade to the latest version that defeats that technique.
Do you think McAfee is upset or happy that people continue to write viruses?
They're selling arms and you're starting wars.
Contrast that to McAfee. They're fighting a long, generally losing arms race with virus writers, but note that in practice they still protect your computer from a lot of viruses. So users need them. If all the viruses in the wild could all be simultaneously upgraded to circumvent the scanner, it would be a different story and everyone would just think of virus scanners as a thing that doesn't work.
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However, I don't like Google's business model either. Being profitable isn't a measurement of making the world a better place.
Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", etc. If that wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware.
In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblock, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them.
There's not much to it, but it's important to note that many ad filters actively try to avoids detection by whitelisting "test ads" or blocking externally loaded adblock detection code. That's why I suggesting inlining this javascript snippet but all of this, of course, is ultimately a cat and mouse game.
http://www.destructoid.com/half-of-destructoid-s-readers-blo...
At Quartz we're lucky - it appears to be 13%. I've used Ad-Blocker for years in the past. Not sure why I stopped (new computer, never installed?) but its been a few years at least.
However now that I work more on the ad side of things (how to make site experience better and maintain reading experience) I can see that blanket ad-blocking is harmful to sites bottom line.
I'm not sure what the answer is, its still Users right to manage their browser VS site operators trying to stay in business
I don't think ad blocking specifically is behind the trend away from leaderboards and towards "native content" advertising, but it's only going to accelerate it.
If you get more customers somebody will create ad-blocker-blocker-blocker (we are going deeper). And ad-blockers have much better position than you have, they can execute anytime and intercept code before it is evaluated.
I just block advertising websites from my hosts file.
In particular, using this: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
From the homepage: Measure: How many of your visitors are blocking ads and how much does it cost you in advertising revenue?
etc etc. They are selling a service.
The case where you need to know if ads are being blocked or not is when you're trying to determine if you should change the ads or find another way to monetize the site.
1) Make ads that aren't annoying 2) Make ads that are low bandwidth 3) Make ads that don't take over the whole page (hiding the real content) 4) Don't show offensive ads (pornography, crude humor, etc) 5) Only advertise stuff that is of high quality and an excellent value for the money -- no junk.
Of course I realize that this will never happen, but one can dream.
http://www.destructoid.com/half-of-destructoid-s-readers-blo...
And if they're skipping out on that payment then calling out people who block ads makes me think of a certain kettle and pot.
If they are paying for that content then props to them for practicing what they preach.
Seems easy enough.
"To use this site, you need to disable AdBlock or any other ads-blocking extension you are using, or customize it to show ads on this site."
We have a file called that which has nothing to do with showing ads. If that's correct it will effectively break the service for anyone using AdBlock.
It does suck that you have to jump through these hoops because flagrantly intrusive ads have poisoned the well for innocent site-owners. I wish it were otherwise.