Do Adblockers Really Cause A Hit To Revenue? Will They In The Future?

On a forum I frequent, there has been a.. "reactionary thread" is one way to put it… about adblocking plugins and extensions for browsers.

By reactionary I mean that people have been over-reacting to something that is a non-issue. I will attempt to explain why it is a non-issue, what the real problem is and what can be done about it.

The question I ask in the title relates to webpublishers’ revenues that relies on click-based adverts.

The answers to these questions are emphatically "No" and "No".

Why is that?
People using adblockers are in the minority.

But let’s be generous and say 1 in 100 (and this is being rather generous) of a site’s unique visitors is using an adblocking technology, or is on a lan corporate lan that filters ads/JavaScript/cookies

The people using adblocking technologies are doing so because they’re not interested in clicking on ads. If they were interested then they wouldn’t block them. They are not the target group for advertisements.

For those people who are very concerned about 1 in 100 person not seeing their adverts then there are a few things that can be done:

• If JavaScript is completely disabled use <noscript></noscript> to display a HTML and/or CSS based "advert" for another site of yours (perhaps one where you sell goods and there are no advertisements). Adblockers cannot block this is along as it’s not an iframe. Include a non-JavaScript access tracker (one that records stats separately from your site’s main tracker) within <noscript></noscript> so you can gauge exactly how significant this problem is.
• Offer additional adverts on your site that only use CSS and/or HTML - no iframes, no JavaScript. There are several like this that work on Cost Per Action or Cost Per Sign Up.

But all this might not help… because people using adblockers aren’t interested in clicking on adverts.

And the insignificant volume (1%) of people who use adblockers to avoid adverts is nothing compared to the people who just don’t want to click and don’t use blockers. These people are in the majority.

So you have to honestly ask yourself: what can I do about people who aren’t interested in clicking adverts? This is often a significant amount of the people who visit a site. Compared to the 1% of people using adblockers (realistically it is likely to be a lot less than 1%), typically 85-95%, or more, of people are just not interested in clicking adverts.

Not doing more to maximise revenue is the problem if you’re unsatisfied about your site’s revenue. Be proactive, be creative, research where your visitors are coming from (access stats) and what interests your visitors (questionnaires or polls).

There are many more ways to make cash than relying on advertising networks. For example, paid site membership (no adverts and more content offered to members), selling goods (including ones relating to your site’s brand if it’s very popular), offering paid services that are genuinely useful.