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?