How to combat Ad Blockers from stealing your Revenue

One of the major disappointment today among online publishers is Ad Blockers. Ad Blockers are tools to stop advertising content that is getting displayed on websites. It is really really hurting online publishers who rely on revenue from their online content. Study shows that there are more than 86 million chrome users who are using ad blocker tool and around 41 million Firefox users. How do we stop Ad Blockers?

A majority of users among ad blockers are Gamers and social media users who wants to get rid of ads on gaming websites followed by Social media websites and tech news websites. Now, the question is why are they blocking ads. There are three main reasons why they are blocking ads. The first reason is that they don’t want third party cookie-tracking. Ads delivered on the user browser leaves behind cookies that will track the data in order to give better user experience in terms of ads when the same user visits the website again. The second reason is that ad blockers will disable the ads so as to allow faster loading of website, thus increasing the computer speed, battery life and etc. and the third reason is that they just don’t like seeing ads, it’s annoying to them. So, all these three reasons are really harmful if your major source of income is through online publishing.

So, how do you combat ad blockers?

Consider the three reasons I mentioned above. Users don’t like cookie-tracking, they don’t like annoying ads, they don’t like websites to load slow and hence they use ad blockers to load the website faster. To combat such a big issue, ad technology has to deliver ads which pleases, simple, compact and fast. Many ad networks don’t target ads properly based on user experience, thus it’s really irrelevant to the visitor.  A lot of sites use annoying popup ads which opens more than 2 popups every time user clicks somewhere on sites. This annoys users and thus they won’t even visit your site next time.

I guarantee that more than 80% of Display advertising will fail when the user has installed ad blocker. In  that case, what works then? What really works is Native Advertising. Native advertising will certainly get displayed 70% of times even if the user has installed Ad Blocker.

What else can you do apart from Native Advertising?

Block your website content from user if they are using Ad Blocker. Websites like The Washington Post blocks their content from user if they are using Ad Blockers.

You can also ask your visitors to contribute to your publishing platform with a fee in order to stop displaying ads just like The Guardian does. If you are Google Adsense user, try Google Contributor  so that you can charge your visitors if they don’t want to see the ads on your website. Its pretty neat and clean.

Although your users use ad blocker, they visit your site because they love your content. If they love your content they will definitely either pay for contribution or they will white list your site in ad blocker. 🙂