If you want to earn money on the internet, users with an installed AdBlock plugin are likely to be a thorn in your side. For many users, the adblocker is already a standard feature. No wonder there are more and more such plug-ins. Adblock, Adblock Plus or uBlock are just the tip of the iceberg. Nevertheless, I have found a way to reduce the adblock rate of my visitors from 43% to 20%.
The damage caused by adblockers is enormous
In 2013 alone, the lost revenue due to blocked advertising amounted to 7.2 billion US dollars worldwide. While there were only 54 million users with an Adblock plugin installed in 2013, there were no less than 216 million users in 2016. So it's no wonder that advertising revenues are declining.
Too much advertising is bad
But those who want to counteract this by placing even more advertising are making the situation even worse. Too much advertising forces more and more users to block it with appropriate plug-ins. Let's take a look at ourselves: we would do the same, wouldn't we?
The goal is to find the right balance between advertising and content.
Less advertising is more
Google is already showing the way with its Adsense rules. Until a few months ago, Google only allowed 3 ad units per page. My experience showed that this is already completely sufficient. Google has now replaced this static restriction with a more dynamic approach, but this rule can still be seen as a guideline. Also, advertising should not disturb the user. Advertising must be clearly marked as such and must not be too close to other content on the website.
Recognise Adblock users
I have written a small JavaScript that recognises Adblock users and records them anonymously. I installed this on one of my pages and was able to determine that about 43% of my visitors had an adblocker installed. At first, I was really shocked by this value. Does this mean that if these 43% had not installed an adblocker, I would have almost 50% more income? It's not quite that easy, but I found a simple way to reduce the adblocker rate to 20% within a year without completely blocking out the adblock users.
var test = document.createElement('div');
test.innerHTML = ' ';
test.className = 'adsbox';
document.body.appendChild(test);
window.setTimeout(function() {
if (test.offsetHeight === 0) {
document.body.classList.add('adblock');
}
test.remove();
}, 100);
The script is integrated into a Javascript tag within the page. It ensures that an empty DIV element with the class "adsbox" is temporarily created and checks whether this would be displayed correctly. If it detects that the display of the "adsbox" was prevented, it can react to this in the bold area. In this example, the CSS class "adblock" is placed on the body element.
How do I deal with Adblock users?
If the script shown above detects an Adblock user, I display a short non-intrusive message:
I would be happy if you deactivate your adblocker, but I also understand if you don't want to do that.
Why have I formulated this so cautiously? You have to know that advertising is not just advertising. By advertising on my site, a visitor is monitored by the advertising network, one also speaks of "tracking". The advertising network, in my case Google, can track my visitors over several pages. This is also the big advantage of Google Adsense because personalised advertising can be displayed, which increases the click rate, but some visitors certainly don't want this.
It has also happened, even with Google Adsense, that malicious code is distributed via advertising. Some visitors also suppress the advertising to protect themselves from viruses.
That should be respected.
If you still want to show advertising to a user with Adblock, you can do this quite easily with Affailiate Links. The prerequisite for this is that the linked banner is located on your own webspace and does not have a name that suggests that it is advertising. With this method, I can deliver advertising even to users with Adblock installed.
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