Encouraging users with AdBlock to whitelist your site - Google AdSense policies

Question

Description:

I found a nice practice on websites to deal with users who take advantage of AdBlock's software - here is an article on it (have a look at the image of the cat).

I think this should be obvious now...

Problem to solve:

I have an ad container on my site and I will place in this container a short note about "whitelist my site", with the following options:

1. Use normal, formatted/plain text.

2. Use an image in the background.

If user has AdBlock, the ad won't appear and my hidden text will appear for them.

According to this AdSense support document:

Encouraging clicks

Publishers may not ask others to click their ads or use deceptive implementation methods to obtain clicks. This includes, but is not limited to, offering compensation to users for viewing ads or performing searches, promising to raise money for third parties for such behaviour or placing images next to individual ads.

In theory what I'm planning is some kind of encouragement for clicking ads.

Question:

Will I be violating Google AdSense's terms if I implement a text only and/or image only "whitelist us" message? Might I have problems with this type of violation?

Answer 1

Encouraging them to disable AdBlock doesn't mean you're encouraging them to click the ads. There's a big difference.

I wouldn't worry about that and give it a try, though I doubt you'll have any success with that method.

Answer 2

This was asked on the Google product forums. The best answer there says that it is not allowed due to the "unnatural attention to ads" clause in the AdSense placement policies:

Publishers are not permitted to bring unnecessary or unnatural attention to their Google ads.

Answer 3

One source on the internet mentioned that Google asked a company who created ad-blocking software to not block adsense ads.

It's never a good idea to tell people that ads support the website financially. I assume you modified the javascript code Google has provided you to make your pictured ad appear. If Google finds this out, they may decide to terminate your adsense account.

Remember the rule... Google doesn't want any earnings to inflate artificially. This means that they only want to pay you if a genuine user without using an ad-blocking software looks at the ad or clicks on it.

The best thing you can do to be fair to everyone including the advertisers is let the link to the ad break naturally as a result of the ad-blocker in action so that the user sees a huge space. Also, include your "advertisement" header as usual.

But if you really want to make income, you need to advertise your website and one great way is with Google Webmaster tools. You need to make a sitemap of your site and submit it into Google, and if they believe your content is valuable, you'll get listed in their search index automatically and when someone searches for what your site is about then you may make more money.

Also, check out the keyword planning tool which is part of Google Ad-words and search for terms on your site to get an idea of how many people are interested in that term and how much an advertiser could pay you (minus Google's share of 36%) if you had an ad on that term and someone clicked it.

Answer 4

I get what you're saying, that it is asking users to do something related to ads (which is generally touchy for AdSense), but in this case the answer is no, they do not penalize you for asking to whitelist.

You cannot ask or suggest that they click the ads or do anything of that sort once they whitelist, but pleading to whitelist is not a bannable offense.

Think of it this way - blockers remove the opportunity for advertising completely. You're simply asking to enable that opportunity (again), which is in Google's best interest. You're not asking users to commit click fraud or anything of the sort.

As an aside, I just launched a product to help publishers make money from ad block users, called FairBlocker (fairblocker.com). It is an ad blocker with a monthly subscription, which we divvy up among sites where ads are blocked to compensate for the lost revenue. Site earnings are very low so far, but I think it could become a meaningful source of revenue for publishers, once we're able to sign up users.