How to force users to disable ad blocker?

Support
22

I don’t see any issue with debating the efficacy of a proposed solution.

We see a lot of examples of the xy problem here on Meta. Contrary to the opinions of certain requestors we’re not here to blindly answer every question. Sometimes those answers are based on flawed or false assumptions, are unethical, or appear user-hostile. Part of the benefit to the community here is the wealth of experience both as community builders and general internet users.

I for one would always either navigate away from sites which try to block access if they believe ads aren’t loading, in other cases I’ll employ something like a 12 foot ladder.

Users don’t usually change their behavior when they run into a wall such as the above. On the other hand there’s plenty of evidence for the other model where a certain level of access is provided to anonymous and basic users, with conversion to a paid tier once they’re sold on the general value of the community.

6 Likes
23

This is a fair point. Though I thought this one had digressed more into the moral maze of adverts themselves, which seemed slightly too far off track to be on-topic/helpful on this occasion.

This seems more salient. :+1:

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25

the vast majority of users block ads and I’m not able to monetize my site through ads, thinking what another way to monetize my site, since I can’t afford to delete the server

1 Like
26

Premium subscriptions perhaps? But then you have to have some wanted content or service to sell.

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27

my country is a poor country, most people would not pay to use a website or buy content online, the only way was to make money from ads, but most of my users are using ad blockers, so I will have to do something, though of not knowing

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28

Yeah, that’s because most everybody doesn’t like ads.

What you can do is find a free one and add it through a theme.

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29

If you have enough traffic, directly contacting advertisers might work. The advertisers could pay a flat yearly fee for the banners instead of per-click. I did that in one forum, because I didn’t want to show lower-quality programmatic ads.

If you hard-code the ads as images in the theme, ad-blockers probably won’t block them automatically. Users could manually block them with uBlock Origin, but it wouldn’t affect income because the advertisers would pay up front.

1 Like
30

Surely if the “ad” is an image as part of the theme it will lose the referer link back to the ad system and therefore only one drop of revenue will acrue.

This theme schme would also need to accommodate users who have accessibility requirements and provide multiple themes for them to select; colour blindness, scotopic sensisticity syndrome, plus a bunch of other conditions.

Perhaps the OP needs to accept that one of two things will happen. Ardent ad haters will not turn off their ad blockers no matter what and either there will some lose of ad revenue or the potential users will go elsewhere reulsting in lose of ad revenue. A lose/lose situation.

1 Like
31

With that kind of ad, there wouldn’t be any ad system. It could be loaded on all themes with a theme component, and it would have the same accessibility as any other image. The URL could be hard-coded with campaign parameters. People who don’t like ads could block the ad with a click, but ad-blockers wouldn’t automatically block the ad.

Something like this:

<a 
    href="https://example.com/product?utm_source=the-name-of-the-forum&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=15off&utm_id=123"
    target="_blank"
>
    <img src="/some-banner-image.png" alt="Some alt text" />
</a>
3 Likes