Adblock is a highly popular browser plugin and technology designed to restrict or remove the advertising you see across the internet. The way it works is, it leverages a large filter list to detect if anything on a website could possibly be an advertisement and blocks it from loading on your browser. It’s efficient enough at what it does, that one third of browsers have it or something almost exactly like it installed. Using plugins like this can be advantageous in certain circumstances, like when you’re visiting random websites that might use tracking and malicious scripts that affect your computer or device negatively. But at the same time, when you block all ads from all websites, you’re taking revenue away from content creators that worked hard to deliver the content you’re presently trying to view. In that last example, we can see this situation as comparable to pirating content and is something you should take steps to protect yourself from, if you depend on revenue from advertising on your website.

The system is rigged

Estimates are that ad-blockers are costing content publishers up to $22 billion dollars a year worldwide and it's not the big players taking the bill. More than 700 companies that have paid ransom fees to the Adblock Plus plugin (the most downloaded plugin), including Google, Microsoft and Reuters. This clearly gives large companies with a lot of money an unfair advantage over their competition who can't afford to pay the ransom fee.

Counter the issue

Adblockers have been steadily on the rise, from 20 million users in 2009, to 200 million in 2015, to over a billion in 2017. As a countermeasure against this serious growth in ad blocking software, we have come up with a couple new features in our Exitget popup platform. You can choose to either remind your visitors that you earn revenue through advertising and that it would be helpful for them to disable adblock on your website or alternatively, completely block them from viewing the content you're providing until they turn adblock off for your website. Most adblock plugins offer the ability to be disabled for specific websites that you choose. Sometimes called disabling or whitelisting, it essentially turns off their adblock plugin when they view your website, enabling your advertising to load.

Maintain a quality user experience

As a publisher it’s your responsibility to provide advertisements in a responsible way, making sure to not reduce the quality of the user experience while browsing your website.

Here’s some rules you can follow:

1. Never preload animadverting that slows down the normal loading processes. It’s very frustrating to find out that your content has been struggling to load because there was a 1080p crystal clear advertisement that had to buffer.
2. Avoid deceptive advertising that trick users into clicking them, for example fake download buttons, or something pretending to be facebook.
3. A reasonable amount of space should be kept between your content and the advertisements you display so that miss-clicks don’t happen.
4. Never use anything that might involve mining for cryptocurrency without the user's knowledge. It’s their right to know if you're going to be using their computer for these heavier performance purposes.
5. Don’t use too much bandwidth causing the loading time to be increased substantially.
6. Most importantly, never display ads from shady advertising networks that have a potential for adware or viruses.

Consider that these factors will play a major role in your visitors choosing to leave adblock off once they have disabled it for your website. Offer a skip button on video ads and put a priority on the content being reached. If someone has bandwidth issues, adblock may become the only choice but by considering these factors your ads can become tolerable and even potentially enjoyable.

Exitget’s Adblock Detection

Finally, we have added a new adblock detection feature to our QuickStart Guide, so that new users can get set up with this easily, without needing to understand how the whole platform works. Best of all, just like the rest of our technology, this feature is completely free to use. So get started now, making one third more revenue than you currently are, using Exitget’s adblock detection and solutions.