Ad Blockers Killing Free Content

Are ad blockers affecting your revenue? Would you like to know more about how to prevent this? Well, you came to the right place, we are going to talk about the impact of ad blockers and how to combat it. 

Firstly we’re going to say, we understand why people have ad blockers. Ads are annoying, some even harmful, but as a blogger, they are a deterrent to wanting to make free content. They cut into not only ad revenue but affiliate and sponsor revenue as well. As a blogger you want to earn a little bit from your labor, just cause you love what you do, doesn’t mean you want to offer it for free.

Blocking the Ad Blocker

Ad blocking is big business, a lot of money and development hours go into creating and updating ad block product. You may not have the time, or know how to keep up with the companies creating ways to stop your cash flow. So the first thing you should do, as we did, is looking for a company that creates software to block the ad blocker.

We blog in WordPress and there are many ad blocker preventer plugins out there. After trying a few of them, the one we like the most is Ad Inserter. The free version is feature rich and has the tools you need to not only insert ads but includes ad blocker detection with prevention measures. 

At the time of writing this blog, we only use the free version. It is used on our blog for Adsense, VI, Affiliate marketing, and personal promotion. For the traffic with ad blockers, we redirect them to a page created asking them to whitelist our blog to view our content. Danielle and I spend a lot of time and have cost to provide the content on our blog. We think it is viewers with ad blockers is like having a guest come in your house, raid the fridge, then leave without even a thank you.

Below is a chart of what ads revenue looked like when ad blocker prevention is off, then when we turned it on June 22. You can see a sharp upward movement in this revenue chart, sorry we did not show the growth in money, but it’s not that much.

We block all users of our website when they visit and are using ad blockers, but you can also just ask them if your goal is more toward traffic than revenue generation from ads. When we started alerting users of their ad blocker, we did not see any growth in revenue. When we started blocking viewers from reading our blog with ad blockers, there was an increase in revenue and traffic.

This seemed strange, but Danielle’s recipes are really good, that viewers, or as we like to call them fans, mostly complied with our request to whitelist our site. This actually made us feel really good, people were willing to trust our site to get to our content.

Below we have included a chart the shows a day of our blog traffic behavior with the ad prevention software running. You will see that 40% of the site viewers stayed, 59% of them, we like to think, whitelisted our site and came back. We came to this conclusion because of our traffic spike, seeing over 50% more views is how we draw this conclusion.

Be kind with your ad blocking prevention

With great power, comes great responsibility and you should be kind with the ads, don’t get greedy. If people are going to trust your site and whitelist, you should not make it painful once they do. Be responsible with the number of ads and their type. If they whitelist your site and you flood them with popups and popunders they may never come back.

Also if you have an ad blocker prevention on your site with a popup or redirect, inform your audience why you did this. Sugar goes a lot further than vinegar to get the desired results. Below I have included what our redirect looks like if you haven’t already seen it because you have an ad blocker as well, and thank you for coming back.

Final Thoughts

We hope that this article helps you make an informed decision on how to prevent ad blockers, and use proper etiquette when doing so. This is a high-level take on what we did if you have feedback or ideas to make this article better, feel free to leave a comment below. Depending on the feedback we get we may go further on this topic.