Diplomacy or espionage: Dealing with your ad-blocking users

Photo credit: Ndemello.

Over the past several years, users who use ad-blocking browsers or plugins have cost the online ad industry millions. Anti-ad blockers or counter-ad blockers constitute a class of services that helps publishers deal with such users. One part of their function involves ad block detection (which is not an easy task since ad-blocking software is designed to avoid all sorts of tracking and detection by anti-ad blockers). The methodology in detection mostly remains proprietary.

Another important part of the technology is that one can easily test and see the logic as it is applied to users while dealing or communicating with websites that run the counter-ad-blocking software. There are about 30 providers worldwide and approaches vary.

I still see a lot of room for improvement on this front. What follows is my attempt to classify the methods and add some missing links.

Diplomacy or espionage?

Anti-ad-blocking modules that openly inform users about ad-blocking software detection are the most common. That’s probably the heritage of paywalls which are many years older than these anti-ad blockers and the entire ad-blocking issue.

The usual “welcome” wording (i.e. “We noticed you’re using an ad blocker […]”) is not exactly sincere, though. That mere notice takes quite an expensive effort. Many users install ad-blocking software exactly because of its anti-privacy-invasion functionality. So, I guess this simple phrase, while politely phrased, is still nonetheless quite annoying.

I personally prefer the stealth option (see below) but, unfortunately, many counter-ad-blocking services lack this functionality.

Acting openly

Besides obvious forks of logic, this option includes the publisher’s important decision on how much access search engines would have to her content. The long-living paywall tradition mostly orbits around protecting access to premium content. That is quite a natural trade and some polite balance is easy to achieve.

The anti-ad-blocking paradigm, on the contrary, is still quite controversial in essence. The fair balance of actions toward users is also yet to be discovered by the industry.

So, there are basically three paths toward which you can guide your users:

Acting stealthily