Should websites block adblock?

[Drakim]

You might recoil in horror at the idea. Websites blocking out users of adblock plus and the like?!?

I've been thinking somewhat about this, and I can honestly say that I think the positive benefits for the website owners could outlast the negatives. Let me elaborate.

Let's say you are running an online newspaper that's funded though online ads. There are several costs to this. For example, you have to pay your journalists, but you also have to pay for hosting and bandwidth. Your source of income are the ads.

The journalist are a once a month cost, while the bandwidth is a per visitor micro-cost. Ad income is a hopefully higher per visitor micro-revenue.

However, an user that uses adblocking tools breaks this system. Although just like piracy, he doesn't use up or take the money that is related to the journalist, he actually does sap bandwidth, forcing you to pay for his visit to your website. And he doesn't generate any profit back though the ads.

Would blocking out people like that hurt your business? He obviously doesn't gain you any income (only an expense) so his business won't be missed. It's not like he will be randomly turning off adblock in his everday life before visiting your site. So what purpose does his visit serve you?

Maybe blocking him out will prevent him from recommending the newsite to his friends. But, isn't it likely that he would also have recommended adblock to his friends? There is also the possibility that he actually does enjoy your newspaper a lot, and might whitelist your site in adblock in order to visit it.

There is also the effect that the more websites that don't work with adblock, the less attractive adblock will be for users. Don't want ads when you are browsing? Great, but 20% of all websites won't work for you anymore!

So, newgrounders, what would you say would be the pros and cons of doing such a thing, except your personal outrage over that you have to actually see ads to get free content? I know flash ads are really annoying, but that could mayhaps be solved by flashblocking but not adblocking, forcing the online ad companies to limit themselves to text and images.

[Elfer]

The con is that if websites started doing this, it would take maybe a few weeks for some people to bang out a version of adblock that's much more difficult for a website to detect.

[Jinzoa]

At 6/16/10 09:13 AM, Elfer wrote: The con is that if websites started doing this, it would take maybe a few weeks for some people to bang out a version of adblock that's much more difficult for a website to detect.

This is more or less guaranteed to happen, most people hate adds at the end of the day and there are people who will go out of their way to create a new version which would be harder to detect. The argument could go on forever between websites who use ads and the users who don't like them, at the end of the day though the majority of people who use them will unlikely change.

[Drakim]

At 6/16/10 09:13 AM, Elfer wrote: The con is that if websites started doing this, it would take maybe a few weeks for some people to bang out a version of adblock that's much more difficult for a website to detect.

That might be the case, however, as long as the adblock modifies the site in any way, JavaScript should be able to detect such changes. I guess you'd have to run adblock and noscript also.

[Elfer]

At 6/16/10 11:37 AM, Drakim wrote: That might be the case, however, as long as the adblock modifies the site in any way, JavaScript should be able to detect such changes. I guess you'd have to run adblock and noscript also.

They'd likely just release an adblock plus plus with noscript already implemented. You can't force ads on everyone, it just doesn't work. Companies have to take solace in the fact that most people are not technically competent or informed enough to implement ad-blocking software.

[thedo12]

Yeah ad-blocking is worse then piracy , since your actually causing them money through bandwidth. Anyways it'd be much better for the companies to change there ads so there not intrusive enough for people to use ad-block but intrusive enough to make money . Your still going to lose money on hardcore ad blockers but it's still better then fighting a war against your own consumers.

[JeremieCompNerd]

I'd like to see adblock gone simply because I don't want to have to PAY for things. So long as someone makes money on ads, they can keep their stuff free. Once that goes, I'm stuck paying my money for things. I don't have the money to pay for admission to NG, so I happen to like their ads. I highly doubt it will ever be gone, however, because nobody else thinks about things like that. We'll just keep blocking out our options until websites are forced to make us pay for the internet in the future. It seems silly when you can just ignore the flashing pics. The only ads that bother me are the in-screen popups used by myspace.

[poxpower]

If people block ads, then in-game ads, product placement, sponsorships and video ads become that much more prized and effective and command a higher price.

The more ads there are, the less they're worth.

[Drakim]

At 6/16/10 11:42 AM, Elfer wrote:

At 6/16/10 11:37 AM, Drakim wrote: That might be the case, however, as long as the adblock modifies the site in any way, JavaScript should be able to detect such changes. I guess you'd have to run adblock and noscript also.

They'd likely just release an adblock plus plus with noscript already implemented. You can't force ads on everyone, it just doesn't work.

Actually, I think you can. It's really only a matter of how far you are willing to go. What are the haxzors going to do once randomized and personalized ads are embedded in the article text? Code an artificial intelligence extension for firefox that searches the article for what could be ads?

[Drakim]

At 6/16/10 12:52 PM, poxpower wrote: If people block ads, then in-game ads, product placement, sponsorships and video ads become that much more prized and effective and command a higher price.

The more ads there are, the less they're worth.

you can't have unblockable in-game ads, product placement, sponsorships and video ads on news articles and other simple things that aren't games or videos. Some things won't survive, methinks.

[VigilanteNighthawk]

I can definitely understand where Drakim is coming from. Blocking ads does severely reduce a site's revenue, and in cases where the ads are relatively small, it seems almost criminal of the user to not allow them. Overall, though, I do think doing so could be problematic.

There are some legitimate reasons why a person would choose to use adblock. One big issue is users who using a mobile data plan. Many of these plans have ludicrously small data allotments. Many I've looked at limit you to 5 gb a month. Even many of the so-called "unlimited" plans will throttle your bandwidth after having gone over some relatively small cap. At such a small amount, even unoptimized image based banner adds can add up. These users may also visit the site on other systems without adblock when they aren't on the mobile connection. The problem can be worse with flash ads which can now load video. Even many wired broad band providers are enforcing limits. I recently had an issue with comcast after I went over there 250 gb limit, though I have reason to suspect that someone broke into my wifi. (Off topic: I was using WEP based encryption, my router's logs were missing, and just about every other wifi router in range of my laptop has suddenly gone from unsecured to using wpa2.)

Another issue is that some of these ads are extremely intrusive. Video ads are obnoxious, especially when you are trying to watch a different video. Yahoo's front page has ads that at times can block users from using the page until the whole ad plays out. Some ads offer a 'close' feature which in facts pops open a new tab or window.Furthermore, if you are running something with limited resources such as a netbook, this can quickly eat up system resources, especially with multiple ads or using multiple tabs. My system has a lower end dual core 64bit processor with 4gb of ram, and I've on rare occasion had issues with high cpu usage due to flash. (Whether this was due to poorly programmed ads, issues with the linux version of the flash player, or issues with my system's video drivers I can't be sure.)

Then there is the issue of actually blocking the users. I'm not sure if you can use javascript to detect adblock users. Aside from turning off javascript (mentioned), I doubt javascript would provide a direct list of what extensions were loaded. The only method I could think of off the top of my head to detect such activity would be use javascript to search for DOM elements that would only be present once an ad was loaded. This would likely require the developer to know what ads were being loaded ahead of time in order to know what elements to search for. This also runs the slight risk of blocking users when an ad fails to load due to technical errors on the ad server's end.

[fli]

If the issue is about revenue, should websites consider that users--if the ads are so bad-- AREN'T going to return?

Yes, it's important for revenue, but there's a consideration for the audience they most consider. If a website is using obnoxious that covers the page up and things like that... Like Yahoo.

This is why I google more often than yahoo.

[Jon-86]

Its almost impossible for a website to do this. Because the webpage goes down the sire and then the ad-blocker alters the page to block the ads. In order to get this to work you would need to allow a site to scan your computer for every known ad-blocker out their.

Access on that level would be a security risk. Not to mention a complete waste of server resources for the site scanning all its users.

Would never happen because its not practical to implement, unless ad-blockers start sending a standard call to every site they act on, that the site can use to determine the presence of an ad blocker. But I dont see that happening. Plus people would just use one that doesn't do this (not that they ever will)

[Drakim]

At 6/17/10 06:27 AM, Jon-86 wrote: Its almost impossible for a website to do this. Because the webpage goes down the sire and then the ad-blocker alters the page to block the ads. In order to get this to work you would need to allow a site to scan your computer for every known ad-blocker out their.

Look, I'm happy you posted in my thread, but don't just make up bullshit like that. As it is now, a simple JavaScript could detect if the ads where blocked on the webpage itself. You don't need to scan the computer or reverese the flux capasator.

Access on that level would be a security risk. Not to mention a complete waste of server resources for the site scanning all its users.

Yeah, if such access was ever needed

[Jon-86]

At 6/17/10 07:17 AM, Drakim wrote: but don't just make up bullshit like that. As it is now, a simple JavaScript could detect if the ads where blocked

Show me an example because I've never seen it done!

[Drakim]

At 6/17/10 07:57 AM, Jon-86 wrote: Show me an example because I've never seen it done!

I'd make one if you wish, but I'll explain it here, as it's a pretty simple concept.

Adblock has an effect on webpages with ads. This is a change to the webpage (by making the ads not load or removing them). Changes can be detected with JavaScript.

So unless the user also blocks JavaScript, it's perfectly easy to detect if ad-block is running, and act accordingly.

Ah, when I think about it, I just remembered a site that uses such a system, 7chan. They remove some of the bandwidth heavy functionality of their website if their ads aren't loading. Thus, people with adblock don't get these features.

[Jon-86]

At 6/17/10 08:07 AM, Drakim wrote: Ah, when I think about it, I just remembered a site that uses such a system, 7chan. They remove some of the bandwidth heavy functionality of their website if their ads aren't loading. Thus, people with adblock don't get these features.

I have looked at ad blockers, they don't stop things from loading as in stop the browser from requesting the resource. They simply hide or remove the ad element.

But like I said, if a site was detecting a crappy made ad blocker people would use one that doesn't actually make it possible to detect.

Nobody would have Javascript on their site that checks every element every few seconds for changes. That would freeze the page.

[Drakim]

At 6/17/10 08:20 AM, Jon-86 wrote:

At 6/17/10 08:07 AM, Drakim wrote: Ah, when I think about it, I just remembered a site that uses such a system, 7chan. They remove some of the bandwidth heavy functionality of their website if their ads aren't loading. Thus, people with adblock don't get these features.

I have looked at ad blockers, they don't stop things from loading as in stop the browser from requesting the resource. They simply hide or remove the ad element.

Adblock plus stops the request itself. But it doesn't matter. Both sorts of "blocking" can easily be detected by JavaScript.

But like I said, if a site was detecting a crappy made ad blocker people would use one that doesn't actually make it possible to detect.

You aren't detecting the adblocker itself, but the ads being hidden or removed.

Nobody would have Javascript on their site that checks every element every few seconds for changes. That would freeze the page.

First of all, it wouldn't freeze the page, but nevermind that. As far as I know, every single adblocker that exists right now only checks the webspage as it loads and as it does additional connections later on. It doesn't randomly block ads 15 seconds nothing has happened.

[Jon-86]

At 6/17/10 08:28 AM, Drakim wrote: You aren't detecting the adblocker itself, but the ads being hidden or removed.

Can you link me to any info about that? Honestly I'm interested. I need to read up on this. It's different from what I've known/seen.

[Drakim]

At 6/17/10 08:41 AM, Jon-86 wrote:

At 6/17/10 08:28 AM, Drakim wrote: You aren't detecting the adblocker itself, but the ads being hidden or removed.

Can you link me to any info about that? Honestly I'm interested. I need to read up on this. It's different from what I've known/seen.

I haven't read any articles about it, but it should be very easy to understand and use.

Everything in HTML are DOM elements that JavaScript can interact with. Adblockers remove or modify these DOM elements so that you don't see any ads. You can make JavaScript check these DOM elements to see if they are still there and unmodified.

If you are really interested, making a topic about it in the programming section and I'll post some code and examples.

[Jon-86]

At 6/17/10 08:48 AM, Drakim wrote: Everything in HTML are DOM elements that JavaScript can interact with. Adblockers remove or modify these DOM elements so that you don't see any ads. You can make JavaScript check these DOM elements to see if they are still there and unmodified.

Thats what I was saying before. If you continually loop through everything it slows the page right down. Thats why people use timers and events. But I will make the thread for you to post info.

On topic, I dont think sites should block users. Its up to a site to strike the fine balance of unobtrusive ads. And no site should rely on ads alone for revenue!

[Drakim]

At 6/17/10 08:53 AM, Jon-86 wrote:

At 6/17/10 08:48 AM, Drakim wrote: Everything in HTML are DOM elements that JavaScript can interact with. Adblockers remove or modify these DOM elements so that you don't see any ads. You can make JavaScript check these DOM elements to see if they are still there and unmodified.

Thats what I was saying before. If you continually loop through everything it slows the page right down. Thats why people use timers and events. But I will make the thread for you to post info.

And that's why I said that you don't need to continually loop though it. You need to check it once, after the page has loaded fully.

On topic, I dont think sites should block users. Its up to a site to strike the fine balance of unobtrusive ads. And no site should rely on ads alone for revenue!

Some sites don't offer any services that you can pay for. How are they to earn money except though ads?

[Jon-86]

At 6/17/10 09:13 AM, Drakim wrote: Thats what I was saying before. If you continually loop through everything it slows the page right down. Thats why people use timers and events. But I will make the thread for you to post info.

This is why I dont see how it works. The page loads, the javascript executes and then the ads are hidden when the plug-in or whatever you use identifies the ad from the loaded page. But I have made that thread in the programming forum to talk about that.

At 6/17/10 09:13 AM, Drakim wrote: Some sites don't offer any services that you can pay for. How are they to earn money except though ads?

The dot com bubble bust long ago. The internet should be an extension to your existing business. Centreing a business around the internet is really risky and not something I would advise anyone to do who isn't financially secure to begin with.

[Drakim]

At 6/17/10 09:20 AM, Jon-86 wrote: This is why I dont see how it works. The page loads, the javascript executes and then the ads are hidden when the plug-in or whatever you use identifies the ad from the loaded page. But I have made that thread in the programming forum to talk about that.

You can actually choose when the JavaScript is to be executed, so it doesn't need to happen before the ads are hidden.

The dot com bubble bust long ago. The internet should be an extension to your existing business. Centreing a business around the internet is really risky and not something I would advise anyone to do who isn't financially secure to begin with.

Granted, but it still doesn't change the fact that some things can only earn money thought ads. How does newgrounds earn money, except though ads? Are they to have a paid membership fee?

[Jon-86]

Newgrounds dose deals and promotions. They have Alien Hominid etc Initially it was the ads but they did pay for it themselves when the ads didn't cover the costs. And they now have the shop.

Not all sites get or will ever get the amount of traffic Newgrounds dose. And you really do need a constant amount of high volume traffic, to make advertising alone worth while. I remember Citricsquid mention this a number of times, whenever it has come up in the programming forum.

[Jon-86]

But I have to say, VigilanteNighthawk made some excellent points!

[lapis]

At 6/16/10 12:35 PM, Victory wrote: I think for a frequent user of a website that relies to a large degree on its advertising for revenue (such as Newgrounds) it is unethical to use adblock. Not something which should be actively pursued by the site, but rather something for the user to consider.

Hmm, in a broader sense it's unethical for users to not click on the ads. After all, Newgrounds only gets paid for the amount of times users visit the advertising websites through the ads on NG - at least that's how all the advertising revenue systems that I have experience with worked. Of course, using Adblock makes sure you never help Newgrounds make any paper so you could call that unethical in a way, but someone who doesn't use Adblock has no reason to feel good about himself if he never actually clicks on the ads (not even by accident).

[Drakim]

On a large scale, just clicking ads don't really generate any money either. Only actually buying a product has any real money transfer.

[lapis]

At 6/17/10 12:46 PM, Victory wrote: Is that the case? I thought a site gets paid a micro-amount per view, and a slightly larger amount per click.

If it's only for clicks, I'd have to agree. I don't know NG's exact ad policy.

It's how Google ads work, and from "professional" experience I know that this is the way to determine how much money hotel booking sites give to specific hotel search websites (number of redirects to the advertiser site from the publisher site).

As for NG, I haven't found anything on the website that says something about their ads, but a short Google search seems to indicate that they use AdBrite. Adbrite itself is extremely vague about how they calculate the ad revenues, but apparently placing the ads in a very porminent place "typically yield[s]" more revenue, which would imply that they also use redirects as a means to calculate the pay-outs (I doubt they have some algorithm to determine the expected number of reveneues simply from the page's source code)

[lapis]

Blegh, looking back I shouldn't rush posts simply because I want to have dinner. By "number of reveneues" I of course mean the amount of revenue. And yes, using AdBrite there could still be a fixed amount of money for page views alone and a floating amount of revenue for redirects, but since "top-of-page ad placements earn 10 times more" according to their guide I doubt that it's a large amount if it exists at all.

Also, Google's ad system apparently also has an auctioning feature which allows advertisers to bid on being able to place ads on a specific (Google ads using) website. The publisher then gets a portion of the revenue of this auction. So this is a way to earn money independent of clicks when your website uses Google ads and is in a sense well-known (the website that I was helping to develop had not reached pop culture legend status yet, though).