Block rate too high

Various discussions related to Adblock Plus development
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Concerned

Block rate too high

Post by Concerned »

Hello, this isn't a rant so please be respectful, I do have a constructive suggestion at the end.

I am a website owner and I have to let one of my three employees go this month due to falling revenue, and it sucks. The thing is that my pageviews and traffic are up month over month and my earnigns per click has remained steady. After installing some code to see how many of my visitors use adblock plus I found that it's a staggering 38% and some research with google trends suggests you will hit 50% by years end. In short this addon is directly responsible for lost revenue, even though I only show ONE non-intrusive ad on my site.

In other words the adblock plus adon is directly responsible for my site having less creative capacity starting next month.
As I said I show ONE ad and it's not even above the fold, it loads asymetrically so it's not slowing down the site and yet adblock plus still deals with it as a problem ad, it's not.

My suggestion:
- Instead of blocking all known ads, have the addon COUNT the number of ads on a page and block only ads that go beyond this number.

If adblock plus reaches the 50% use rate projected to happen later this year then I would have to let another employee go and I can tell you right now that will not happen. At 50% the display ad model becomes less attractive than other models such as sponsorship and/or member only content. At 50% I will likely have no choice but to block all adblock plus users and offer them the option of turning off the addon and reloading the page, pay to become a member or sponsor, or go somewhere else. You can imagine that as you trend higher towards 50% that your success will also become your biggest headache as website owners begin treating your users as non-visitors and more deeply funded sites may begin a class action suit in order to recover lost revenue.

If websites stop showing ads completely, which is the ultimate goal of adblock plus, many sites would earn no revenue and would shut down or fight back... that's not a good place for anyone, consider my suggestion for a future build, please.
concerned

Re: Block rate too high

Post by concerned »

P.S. I know that the addon states "Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites" but I ensure you that many users are turning off all ads. Thanks to webmasters who ultimately spam ads people come here and given the option of removing all ads and being done with them ... that's what they do.
lewisje
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Joined: Mon Jun 14, 2010 12:07 pm

Re: Block rate too high

Post by lewisje »

Please apply to get on the Acceptable Ads whitelist: https://eyeo.com/acceptable-ads-application.html

BTW, although the goal of many of the extremists on this forum is for websites to "stop showing ads completely," the goal of Eyeo is to disincentivize the annoying ads; they created the Acceptable Ads Initiative precisely because they noticed that the rise of ad-blockers was threatening to make the ad-supported Web, free to the end user, non-viable, so now the great unwashed masses who just install ABP and forget about it will not block the less annoying ads.

Of course, this doesn't protect your site against those who know better and turn off the whitelist, or those who install similar content-blockers like AdBlock or u block, which do not include such a whitelist by default, so you might want to take the route of Hulu by somehow keeping your content from showing up if the ads are blocked, especially if your Acceptable Ads application is denied, but the cat-and-mouse game is very difficult to win: Hulu and the BBC's 4oD are the only anti-adblock examples I can think of that haven't been circumvented (Hulu is whitelisted in EasyList itself for a reason), and all of their interesting content is video, loaded by plugins, and I'm not sure you can do as many anti-adblock shenanigans with just Javascript.

However, if ABP decided to implement your suggestion, without a way for advanced users to disable it, then like Simple Adblock and Adblock Pro before it (which used such a scheme to encourage people to buy the full versions, and are now defunct), ABP will become terribly unpopular, as even people like me turn against it and spread the word that ABP is no longer trustworthy; the now-foolish fork Adblock Edge will become the dominant ABP fork, and both AdBlock and u Block will gain popularity, with substantial work toward porting them to IE and Android forthcoming (or, as it did with its "typo correction" feature, it would quickly revert the suggestion when it realizes just how unpopular it is).

Any sort of "only block *this many* ads" scheme would be ABP giving the finger to its userbase.
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: Block rate too high

Post by Gingerbread Man »

Hello,
Concerned wrote:I only show ONE non-intrusive ad on my site. [...]
yet adblock plus still deals with it as a problem ad, it's not.
If your ads meet the Acceptable Ads criteria, submit an application to have them whitelisted.
en/acceptable-ads#application
Concerned wrote:If websites stop showing ads completely, which is the ultimate goal of adblock plus
The tagline is, "Surf the web without annoying ads!". The second bullet point on the main page says, "Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites (configurable)".
Concerned wrote:Instead of blocking all known ads, have the addon COUNT the number of ads on a page and block only ads that go beyond this number.
I don't see how this would even be technically feasible. Blocking means preventing external resources from loading. It's not reasonable to stall the loading of each web page while you check the total count of items that would be blocked, then let it all go through or block depending on the result. It's also not reasonable to either block or allow everything, then reload the page once you're done counting if the prior behavior wasn't the correct decision.

As mentioned in the previous post, if this were added as an option, anyone annoyed by it would simply turn it off. If it were mandatory, then people would jump ship en masse to another ad-blocking add-on. Adblock Plus may be the most popular, but it's certainly not the only one. Less popular alternatives have user bases numbering in the millions, but unlike Adblock Plus, they don't whitelist unobtrusive ads by default, nor do they offer that option at all.
Lain_13
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Re: Block rate too high

Post by Lain_13 »

In fact it is not even technically possible to count number of ads on the page.

Example:
We have a script which inserts on the page multiple ad blocks from different sources or the same one but we have only 1 rule in the list which blocks that script. So, when we visit the page it will count as 1 hit yet there will be 100 of banners on the page. We won't block it since it's only one hit yet we will allow a lot of banners to load. Sometimes these banners even loads as one single file so it is not possible to tell how many are going to load.

BTW, it's popular case when 1 ads block generates a lot of separate requests. Especially when it contains multiple small images of some products. So, even if we will allow first script to load all queries generated by that script may exceed threshold which means we will have to restore page back to state BEFORE script got loaded and started to modify it. That may make ABP incrediblymore complex and certainly much slower. That alone will make users to search for a faster alternative.

Example 2:
We have a lot of filters in additional subscriptions which blocks extra stuff which have absolutely nothing to do with ads like statistic and annoying page elements yet they counts towards blocked elements. So, even on a page with 1 ad block we may have 100 of hits for content which have nothing to do with ads. Also we have user filters which is not even possible to classify.
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