I was just curious on your standpoint towards ad blockers, such as the extentions to FireFox and IE that allow you to block virtually any ads on websites. To demonstrate this I took a few screenshots of some websites with ad block enabled and disabled. Clean website #1 Ad filled website #1 Website #2, with ads. And here's the second ad free site! Look at this.. Compared to this! For this, I am currently using Firefox 2.0 , Adblock Plus & Filterset G I have been looking into the ad block issue for many months now. I attempted to make a thread about it a while ago but the intrest in the ad blocker just wasn't great enough. Since then (under 100,000 total installs of adblock), it has exploded. The official page on the mozilla website boasts 3,049,002 total downloads, of which 150,000 happened just in the past week! Personally, I run many websites whos income is reliable on ad revenue. I would never advertise or supprt any ad blocker to anybody visiting my websites. Yet, to my friends and anyone I speak to personally, I reccommend them to install it immediately. It is a much nicer browsing experience, giving any websites visited a much nicer appearance without the annoyance of external advertising. The original layout of the website looks much nicer without the color scheme being broken by "oUtDrInK tHe FrAt BoY!!11" or "wHiCH rApPeR iS tHiS!?" I had originally installed these ad blockers ages ago as an experiment to see what the results would be. After a month of using it, I would uninstall them and give my report. Sadly, this was many months ago. I have kept adblock installed. Since then I have been thinking about the consequences of ad blockers installed and what to do about it. Back in the day, 100,000 people.. thats nothing, no part of the internet population to do a real damage. Yet now, with over 3,000,000 ad blockers installed (Alone for this software), they can have a serious impact on the revenue you make from the same amount of traffic. Some ways of bypassing ad blockers are by simply adding / selling static links and ads, since these dont get blocked. Although the best suggestion I could come up with is private ad sales. Static banners can be blocked with two clicks, but links out cant be blocked. Another thing I do heavily is adding links to CPA ads. Be it your regular 'free ipod' or that kind of thing, with an EPC of 20 cents or so at least knowing it can't be blocked is worth it for me. If one is really extreme about this, you can make your websites layout be dependant on ads - making the ads support the structure of the website. (Read: with no ads, the layout messes up). I'm sure some of you wont take this as a serious issue yet, but months ago I saw this and was told to wait, it wouldn't turn into anything big. I was right, it did, and it continues to grow at an amazing rate. So the question is simple.. do you take it as a threat, yet? Are you going to do anything about it?
I've been using AdBlock for FF for a long while now and am really glad with the results. I can block ANYTHING. No more google ads, yahoo ads, flash ads, banner ads, anything. I don't think there is anything we can do except minimize our dependency on Ad revenue.
I dont take it as a threat, I personally believe only the competent ones at the internet will install it and using it, and I believe those arent the type that would click on the ads anyway. It may seem that use of an ad-blocker is prevalent with users on a forum, but they represent a small percentage of the internet population.
Wyla - what's your suggestion for monetizing sites without ads? Particularly for sites like forums and blogs?
CPA, Affiliate programs, link sales, Forums - Mass PM ads, Blog - Write posts for another company Plenty of ways to earn money without ads.
But is writing posts for another company as paying as earning from you own site where you keep on earning from content for long time. In some cases, i have recovered 10 times the money I paid for an article in just a week.