AdBlock Users: How to Make a Profit?

The ad-block usage rate is getting bigger and bigger everyday. Adblock users are a real problem for bloggers and site owners, especially for those whose only source of monthly income is an ad revenue. We want to present you some tips on how to deal with visitors of your site who use adblock and how to win back your income.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the tactics. Here’s what you can do to deal with ad-block users:

• Detect adblock users and ask them to disable the ad-block plugin while navigating your site;
• Limit the number of page impressions on your site, if a visitor continues to surf with adblock on;
• Ask users for a regular donation in exchange for the possibility of seeing the content of your site without ads;
• Publish sponsored content (articles, products, affiliate program) to fill the gap caused by ad-blockers.

Step 1: Ask your audience for help

One of the presented methods is to politely ask ad-block users to ‘whitelist’ your blog or website. You can explain them in a short message how the money you’re making by serving ads on your website helps you to continue creating and publishing new free-of-charge content on it. When users realize that your site is being damaged as a result of ad-block practice, they will be more eager to turn it off for you.

When it comes to a message, experiment with different copy. Find out which phrasing suits your audience better. The effectiveness of your message depends on the character of your blog/website and, what is even more important, on your audience. For example, if your site’s audience is formed mostly by Millennials, you can try a humorous copy.

Start with trying a simple message, as this one: “I serve the content for free. Help me to pay for the servers – turn the adblock off.”; or or you can create something more sophisticated, as OKCupid did.

WordPress Plugins

One of the options to handle the ad-block users problem on WordPress blog is to use the anti-adblock plugin. You can choose from a variety of options, such as the type of the message you will show to your visitors (discreet box at the top of the screen or page-blocking popup) and the number of page views before a visitor sees your message.

Another good tool for that is AdBlock Notify. At the beginning you can just observe the ad-block usage rate statistic which this plugin offers and decide if this number is worth fighting for. It’s possible that ad-block users are more than 50% of your audience, so you will need to be careful with the tactic you want to use to regain your income and, at the same time, not lose your loyal visitors.

You can find more WordPress Plugins in this article published on ThemeIsle.

Blogger Scripts

One of the options we found to use on Blogger is this one, described by MyBloggerLab Team. This option helps you to detect adblock and to get rid of it. You can implement the script presented in the article to force users to disable adblock. But, once again, be careful – you want to regain your money, not lose your traffic.

Redirect adblock Users (all type of websites)

If you have a website other than WordPress or Blogger you can try to use a script presented by Vishveshwar Jatain on AdPushup Blog which redirects your ad-block users to another page:

The most heavy handed tactic of all, if you just don’t want anything to do with ad block users, you can just redirect them to another web page.

The redirect page could be one of your own pages (maybe a page where you request them to whitelist you) or a third party page: Any URL basically.

Let’s assume that your website is http://website.com and you want to redirect ad block users to http://website.com/adblock, you can use the following JavaScript code to detect if the height of your ad container is 0 after page load (which means that your ads aren’t loading), and if yes, proceed with the redirection:

$(function() {
if (!$(“#yourAdContainer”).height()) {
window.location.href = “www.website.com/adblock”;
}
});

Keep in mind though that there’s a high chance that the readers who are redirected this way will not be coming back to your website.

Note: Ad block detection and redirection are based on the successful execution of JavaScript or jQuery. If the user has NoScript installed, you need to take a different route to redirection by using this HTML code snippet:

Step 2: Thank Your Audience for Whitelisting by Serving Less Ads

This sounds crazy, but if you decide to ask your users to whitelist your site, think of what they are going to see after enabling ads. If you think there’s too much ads to easily navigate your site, consider introducing some changes. With less ads you will be able to gain more traffic, besides, a website with less ads is always more user friendly.

We’ve already presented some tips on how to prevent the traffic lose caused by putting too much ads, but here are some more adshrink tactics you can use in order to improve the quality of ads displaying on your website:

• AdShrink Custom Ad Page (option available for adshrinkusers after their first withdraw). Custom ad page with the logo and colors of your blog or website will surely improve user experience, a lot of our partners use it with good results (more visits counted). When it comes to convert visitors of your site into loyal users, the custom ad page also can help you a lot.
• (NEW!) RTB Overlay Ad: we have developed new option of using our Entry Overlay Ad Page. RTB Overlay Ad will be displayed only when the rate is high – our system is able to recognize how much you’ll get paid for each impression. Based on this knowledge, we decide whether to show the ad to a visitor or let them navigate more. So, if the ad impression doesn’t have high rate, the ad won’t show up. This solution can help you to earn good money without showing too much ads to your visitors. It is quite fresh feature, so if you’re interested in trying this it out, contact our support.
• Capping in the Script – you can easily limit the number of served ads to just one or two a day. Observe how your traffic and your income change. It’s possible that you won’t lose any money: sometimes less ads make the conversion percentage bigger and you can get even better results. On the other hand, your visitors will be pleased with a website much easier to navigate. You can set up the capping by editing our website script or by changing the adjustment of AdShrink Plugin dedicated for WordPress.

If you’re not sure if the way you use AdShrink is the most profitable for you, contact our Staff. We will be more than happy to help you with improving your current income without a risk of losing your loyal audience!