Prevent users from preventing my website ADs from being displayed?

Question

It may not be 100% of the users but even a localized amount of users that make use of ads blocking features will reduce your incoming.

I do care about my users as well as I do care about receiving some incoming for my hard work.

Currently I keep an watch on the ADs being displayed and remove the ones that have eye-hurting type of either images or text, ADs that are non-related to my content and I don't exagerate on ADs, i have 2 ads on a rather big content website and am planning to add an Amazon Store thing later.

Now I would like to know:

1. What type of ADs do you usually remove from users view ?

2. Are there ways to prevent this sort of blocking ?

3. What kinda of work arounds you usually do to prevent it ?

   The difference between question 2 and 3 is that question 2 is related to legitmate ways to prevent this while question 3 is regarding any way to work around it.

4. What ADs Format do you use the most, what type (image, flash, text) and how does it influence on the above ?

Answer 1

Blocking people from blocking ads is virtually impossible, as at the end of the day the user has full control over their browser. If I want to disable 99.999% of all ads on the internet today, I would

• Disable Images
• Disable Javascript
• Disable iFrames

from my Firefox and although the internet would look pretty crappy and broken, I 99.999% of all ads would be gone.

The way most ad blockers work is they search image, javascript and iFrame URLs for known keywords, and then generic keywords (e.g. 'adsense' 'doubleclick' and 'ad', etc).

To get around this your best bet would be to serve the ads in-house by rendering the insertion code server-side and avoiding all keywords.

For example, instead of including:

<script src="myadscript.js"> which then loads an iFrame which then loads a JPG (as a lot of ad clients do), you would need to serve up:

<img src="/somethingthatsnotanad/bagdgf.jpg" /> - now bagdgf.jpg might very well a PHP script that does the ad fetching and whatnot for you, or it could be a link to a real ad, but that's going to be the only way to defeat a lot of ad blockers, as they'll have a hard time differentiating between that image and an ad image.

-- Addendum --

You'll also most likely need to mask the affiliate URL you're linking to as well, because ad blockers will have a good method of matching these. If your <href> is linking directly to the affiliate, it will probably still get caught. You'll need to also mask this with a server-side redirect, so your href might point to /jsdaf.php?id=$adid and from there do a 301 Redirect

Answer 2

There's simply no point in trying to prevent your visitors from blocking your ads. They will always find a way to do it. Before you spend a huge amount of time trying to prevent ad blocking, you should ask yourself this question:

Are the types of people that block ads also the type of people that click ads?

The point is you can try to prevent people from blocking your ads, but if someone is smart enough to use an ad blocker, then they're also smart enough to avoid clicking on ads.