As I stated many times before, my goal with Adblock Plus isn’t to destroy the advertising industry.
I'll play the devils advocate, with conflicting interests, so
Nope, your goal is perhaps to earn money on the back of the webmaster and that might be considered theft. Some ads are intrusive, yup very. Example in point, the economist. It has so many ads, I hate being on that website for more than a bit. What do I do, click away. Problem solved. I still have the power you see, without necessarily punishing the other webmasters who aren't as intrusive.
Now, of course it is a free market economy. The advertisers want sales so they become intrusive, the publisher wants revenue so they hold the ads, the visitor wants free content so he bears the hassle, or of course being smart installs an adblock and leaves the previous two in cold water. Fair enough, power to him who has the knowledge that such option exists, but no need to come back playing the fox saying you do not really want to give them such option. You clearly are providing a service and that service is attracting only low subscription currently, if it was higher subscription then your service would go cold as the webmasters would adapt. But seriously if by definition a blocker of ads does not destroy advertising then perhaps it should change the name to blocker of something else.
P.S. No wonder I hardly get revenue from Firefox users, perhaps as a way of regression every webmaster should block the smart firefox users and be stuck with the hell of internet explorer.
It's quite simple to detect and block only adblock users if you wish. It's about 6% of firefox users on my webapp. Or you could show them "Donate here if you're not prepared to see my ads" links everywhere.
How do you do so? I am not a programmer although have some experience of it, just a curious guy who happened to stubble upon this place with people which seem at least able to share a love for umm 'thinking' :P . I do not plan to implement a blocking of them guys, as I said fair to them, they have the knowledge and are not quite a threatening statistics. I'll save the time load for this thing I am trying to figure out of how to automate the change of the most viewed articles.
Simple method would be to try and load content from often blocked domains and see if it loads properly or not using js. I did this a while ago and measured the 6% firefox users using adblock.
For example:
// cb = function to call with result
function detectAdblock(cb) {
var tt = document.createElement("div");
tt.style.display = "none";
document.body.appendChild(tt);
var i = document.createElement("iframe");
i.src = "http://adv.foo.com/ads/-adspace?ad_id=&affiliate=&advert=678";
var foo = i.style.cssText;
tt.appendChild(i);
window.setTimeout(function() {
cb(foo!=i.style.cssText);
}, 200);
}
This works because adblock is pretty primitive and just checks for keywords in the iframe src, and if there sets the visibility or display css style etc.
To get around adblock, you can proxy through your own domain, and stay clear of showing the ads in iframe/image/flash. Use js to put them in with everything else as text links which perform far better than any other type of advertising anyway.
I actually was looking at this recently. There used to be some foolproof ways to identify ABP, but they removed them - as a bug fix IIRC. They definitely don't want to be identifiably.
But there are a few heuristic methods, basically just loading an image from a blocked domain (it's a sure thing double click will be blocked), waiting, then checking the DOM to see if the element has been removed. Not fool proof, or specific to AdBlock but good enough.
I have a couple of detection demos (including flash block) here:
I'll play the devils advocate, with conflicting interests, so
Nope, your goal is perhaps to earn money on the back of the webmaster and that might be considered theft. Some ads are intrusive, yup very. Example in point, the economist. It has so many ads, I hate being on that website for more than a bit. What do I do, click away. Problem solved. I still have the power you see, without necessarily punishing the other webmasters who aren't as intrusive.
Now, of course it is a free market economy. The advertisers want sales so they become intrusive, the publisher wants revenue so they hold the ads, the visitor wants free content so he bears the hassle, or of course being smart installs an adblock and leaves the previous two in cold water. Fair enough, power to him who has the knowledge that such option exists, but no need to come back playing the fox saying you do not really want to give them such option. You clearly are providing a service and that service is attracting only low subscription currently, if it was higher subscription then your service would go cold as the webmasters would adapt. But seriously if by definition a blocker of ads does not destroy advertising then perhaps it should change the name to blocker of something else.
P.S. No wonder I hardly get revenue from Firefox users, perhaps as a way of regression every webmaster should block the smart firefox users and be stuck with the hell of internet explorer.