I cringed a little when I saw a notice in my feed reader for this anti-Adblock plugin for WordPress. The plugin tries to detect if you’re using Adblock (or presumably other methods of filtering out ads) and “display a floating customizable notification message to your visitor humbly asking them to support your blog by turning off their AdBlock software.”
Here’s the problem with such tools. First, users who are blocking ads are doing so for a variety of reasons. Some of us consider ads to be a security issue and so block them all. Some people have ideological issues with ads. Regardless, people who are going so far as to block all ads are hardly going to come to your site and start clicking on them just because you bug them, so why add that little annoyance to the experience.
Second, in many cases such notices go way beyond annoying and get extremely frustrating. My favorite example of this is whoever has programmed the idiotic anti-adblock feature at DailyKos. It is bad enough I see this long-assed explanation of why I should turn off adblocking when visiting that site on my laptop. But I also see the message every time I visit their site on my Blackberry. But my Blackberry doesn’t have any adblocking software installed — it is just not capable of displaying the ad in the browser because of the limitations of the software.
So every time I want to visit the DailyKos I have to page down through several screens of lame ass “please view our ads” . . . which means I almost never visit the site anymore. Of course I imagine DailyKos can afford to lose a few pissed-off readers who don’t want to be lectured every time they visit.
Can you?
To block the Kos-wahh-mbulance, add this line to AdBlock Plus:
dailykos.com#BLOCKQUOTE(id=adblocker)
Thanks for the tip.
The problem is I see it most of the time on my Blackberry…which is stripping out the ads I assume because they’re in Javascript.
Just wish Kos didn’t throw up several screens of “please stop blocking our ads” when I’m on a platform that can’t display them in the format they’re using.
See it that way,
you may be annoyed by ads and anti ad blocker applications.
But people that filter ads are not welcome on that kind of sites. So if your are pissed of by them or not, the author of those ad sense driven sites simply don’t need guys like you (us). They just suck up bandwith anyway
“See it that way,
you may be annoyed by ads and anti ad blocker applications.
But people that filter ads are not welcome on that kind of sites. So if your are pissed of by them or not, the author of those ad sense driven sites simply don’t need guys like you (us). They just suck up bandwith anyway”
Which may certainly be true, but that is a bizarrely short-sighted view. I consider ads a security risk and so am not going to block them. But if I can’t view the content there, then I’m not going to blog about it and I’m not going to forward links to the site to my friends and co-workers.
This is very similar to the NYT’s logic for awhile that making its content scarcer would make it more valuable. Since the cost of finding a competior site is so low, deploying “solutions” like this is akin to stabbing yourself in the back.
Honestly, Kos can probably get away with that and me ignoring them would be a drop in the bucket. But if Animalrights.net or Voicesofunreason.com tried that kind of stunt nobody would bother to visit again. (And I may not be completely accurate about Kos, either, since I can get all those EXACT opinions in other places. Like Countdown With Keith Olbermann. *rimshot*)
Have any of you tried the DoGooder Firefox extension from DoGood Headquarters? Has some parallels to the ad blocker… doesn’t block ads so publishers get paid…