A sudden surge in adblock detectors

[JoostinOnline]

Is it just me, or has there been a huge increase in sites prompting you about disabling an ad blocker?  It seems like half the sites I visit ask me to turn off my ad blocker, and half of those won't let me read the page unless I disable it.

[Volbet]

An increase in AdBlock-blockers would only be natural as the amount of AdBlock users grow.

Online services also have to make money, and they have no incentive to serve their content to people that circumvents their payment model.

[JoostinOnline]

2 minutes ago, Volbet said:

An increase in AdBlock-blockers would only be natural.

Online services also have to make money, and they have no incentive to serve their content to people that circumvents their payment model.

I understand that, and I've noticed it increasing over the years.  I put out a request for my members to whitelist my site.  But this seems like a huge surge of detectors over the past month.

[Volbet]

1 minute ago, JoostinOnline said:

I understand that, and I've noticed it increasing over the years.  I put out a request for my members to whitelist my site.  But this seems like a huge surge of detectors over the past month.

These thing usually evolve exponentially. As more sites begin using AdBlock-blockers, the more sites will become aware of them and begin implementing them.

As the amount of AdBlock users grow, the cost/benefit of implementing such a solution also becomes better.

 

I personally haven't noticed such an increase, but I also tend to pay my way out of ads on online services.

[Misanthrope]

What happened is that advertisers and the websites that hired their services got extremely carried away with the ads to the point that they became a liability for not only the user experience but even performance and security.

 

Now after adblock started getting popular they doubled down on the ridiculousness of the ads (amount and obnoxiousness) even more to make up for the lost ad revenue and thus pushing adblock to be even more aggressive continuing this arms race.

 

Now we are faced with the dilemma of many websites buckling down under pressure or flatout trying to guilt their viewers into removing adblock and in many popular cases, flatout refusing service if adblock is detected. This confrontational approach is just the conclusion of the early stubbornness of webmasters to addressing the concerns of their viewers and working with their customers (advertisers) to make things viable without being obtrusive.

 

Bottom line is: advertisement in the past allowed many websites to even exist. This is true. But my conclusion is simple: many of those websites, most even, don't have a right to exist and shouldn't exist. The market was never there to support them, it was artificially inflated by predatory practices and consumers just caught up to them with adblock. This is basically you losing your customer because your product wasn't good enough: you made up for your short comings with too many ads trusting people wouldn't be able to do much about it but now they have and they're going away.

 

So don't blame adblock because that's just an indirect way of blaming your customer and if that's your battle, you already lost.

[CryptoMatt]

Maybe they should try to make money better ways then spamming 80 ads on a page. Then people wouldn’t use ad block. 

 

Or you know provide an actual good or service don’t just make shitty articles that are usally half copied from other sites  and slap ads all over it for quick cash.

[captain_to_fire]

I wouldn't be so surprised if one of these days YouTube decides to prevent people from using it with an ad blocker enabled.

 

[Froody129]

It's a couple dumbass sites that makes AdBlock necessary for them and then the legit sites that are using sane amount of ads lose out and have to close down. I don't have an adblocker because I want to keep seeing content from sites I support

[Misanthrope]

1 minute ago, hey_yo_ said:

I wouldn't be so surprised if one of these days YouTube decides to prevent people from using it with an ad blocker enabled.

 

Maybe but there's a piece of data I'd like to see because I suspect it would be relevant: What percentage of people who do use adblock on their PC or laptop also find a way to block ads on other devices?

 

Because nowadays it's fairly common to people to view youtube on smart tvs, phones and tablets. And those have far less prevalent adblocking. So even if it's true that PC users of youtube are bypassing the revenue source completely, I think there's quite of overlap of the same people who eventually and even frequently open youtube on their tv or phone and then they do get through the ads simply because they're already invested in youtube.

[JoostinOnline]

1 minute ago, Froody129 said:

It's a couple dumbass sites that makes AdBlock necessary for them and then the legit sites that are using sane amount of ads lose out and have to close down. I don't have an adblocker because I want to keep seeing content from sites I support

I always turn it off for sites that I like, and usually for sites that ask nicely.  I immediately disabled it on here, although I never see any ads anyway.  I understand why sites prompt you to turn them off.  It just seems to have rapidly increased.

 

I did find this article from a few weeks ago:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/27/thousands-of-major-sites-are-taking-silent-anti-ad-blocking-measures/

[Froody129]

Just now, JoostinOnline said:

I always turn it off for sites that I like, and usually for sites that ask nicely.  I immediately disabled it on here, although I never see any ads anyway.  I understand why sites prompt you to turn them off.  It just seems to have rapidly increased.

 

I did find this article from a few weeks ago:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/27/thousands-of-major-sites-are-taking-silent-anti-ad-blocking-measures/

Well I mean ads are something I can see and choose to ignore, but if everyone is AdBlocking and expecting the same level of content then we're going to see a rise in the amount of browser based miners or other forms of money earning because they have to get money somehow.

 

 

[captain_to_fire]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Because nowadays it's fairly common to people to view youtube on smart tvs, phones and tablets. And those have far less prevalent adblocking.

Yes because while both iOS and Android allows ad blockers on their app stores, most of them only works within the browser and not within the YouTube app so pre-roll ads are still there.

3 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Because nowadays it's fairly common to people to view youtube on smart tvs, phones and tablets. And those have far less prevalent adblocking. So even if it's true that PC users of youtube are bypassing the revenue source completely, I think there's quite of overlap of the same people who eventually and even frequently open youtube on their tv or phone and then they do get through the ads simply because they're already invested in youtube.

I don't think Google would be very happy if smart TV makers like LG or Samsung or streaming devices like an Apple TV or an Xbox One X would allow ad blockers to run on them. But I think a lot of people still watch YouTube on their PCs but it would be interesting if Google decides to release statistics on which devices YouTube is viewed.

[captain_to_fire]

1 minute ago, Froody129 said:

Well I mean ads are something I can see and choose to ignore, but if everyone is AdBlocking and expecting the same level of content then we're going to see a rise in the amount of browser based miners or other forms of money earning because they have to get money somehow.

While I can understand why many people use an ad blocker like protecting against malware or privacy concerns, it's a compromise people have to swallow if they want free content because in reality, nothing is free and those website owners have to keep the lights on and pay the bills. Besides, I think an ad or two while scrolling on a website is much more acceptable than some websites resorting to injecting cryptocurrency mining malware to computers.

[porina]

I think part of the problem is "acceptable" ads vs unacceptable ones. Inline, static, relevant to the site with using personal tracking, I can tolerate. If it induces an epileptic fit in someone with no history, that's too far. Unfortunately a lot of it is in the latter category.

 

Some sites I just don't visit any more due to anit-adblock. The only reason I used to is because they occasionally pop up in the news section here. Without naming names, they're what I consider soft news sites with dumbed down tech for a non-tech audience, so I'm not missing a lot. Actually, there are some pretty bad clickbait tech sites also who seem to only exist to serve ads I also try to avoid. You know the story, big catchy headline, click to get more info, and basically all they knew was in the headline. Saves you the visit.

 

Anandtech is an interesting one. I get clickbait ads on their site... I mean, it is just sad that crap makes economic sense. Then again, Trump did get voted in...

[divito]

It has grown more recently. I will sometimes temporarily pause ad block to view something I'm interested in, but most of the time, I will simply leave and find the article elsewhere. Very rarely is it something I can't get somewhere else.

[Princess Luna]

Not really but then again I use tampermonkey scripts to avoid detection of ad blockers.

[Zodiark1593]

6 hours ago, Froody129 said:

Well I mean ads are something I can see and choose to ignore, but if everyone is AdBlocking and expecting the same level of content then we're going to see a rise in the amount of browser based miners or other forms of money earning because they have to get money somehow.

 

 

That would be a bit of an apocalyptic event for anything running on battery, by which I mean "What do you mean just reading the article here for a few minutes drained 20% of my battery!?"

 

I wouldn't think many webmasters are dumb enough to perform mining on visitor's phones, especially if most of the traffic comes from mobile devices.