May I ask a reader to whitelist an article in their ad blocker?

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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   What is there to lose?

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      EricFarmer8xposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      An optional popup would probably be OK but anything more forceful and I would not suggest it. I mean this for personal websites. I know some people will blacklist websites if they force you to view ads. But it could be said people that extreme were never going to view ads anyway.
      
      The web content for free situation is quite tricky. I won't pretend to know a solution.

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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   Preferably a popup would do this. Why not run an experiment to see whether it generates any more revenue?

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   DrMark1961posted 6 years ago

   Great idea. I have seen sites with "To improve your experience, please disable your ad blocker software".

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   paradigmsearchposted 6 years ago

   Good topic. Caused me to do a search. Found this:
   
   "Where Will the Ad versus Ad Blocker Arms Race End?"
   https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti … -race-end/

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      EricFarmer8xposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      That headline sums it up great. It is an arms race sometimes.

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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   The popup seems to have become more common on sites and while jovially suggested on some that the the site owners need to earn a crust somehow to put the effort into providing information and turning off is optional, on others a reader is actually blocked from proceeding unless they agree.

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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   I think I'll try making a suggestion on my highest traffic article.

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   Natalie Frankposted 6 years ago

   So you're just going to say something along the lines of the "To improve your experience" statement or just "To improve your experience, please whitelist this article in your adblock software," or ". . . please disable your adblock software for this page"?

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      eugbugposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Well more like something about how we put a lot of time and effort into writing helpful articles and we need to earn. The chances are that it'll just be ignored. A popup would be a better solution.

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   DrMark1961posted 6 years ago

   I am not sure everyone appreciates how serious this problem is becoming. On Sunday, for example, my page views went up over 2000 from Saturday. There were only 600 impressions however. (Almost all of them were from Google android.)

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      eugbugposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Agreed, and readers are getting too much for nothing. In the case of Q&As, some of them are even so arrogant as to demand why their answers aren't being answered quickly enough.

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         DrMark1961posted 6 years agoin reply to this

         Yes, I have seen a few of those too. I want to answer with "Send me your credit card payment of $49.95 and I will get right on it."

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         EricFarmer8xposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         I remember there was a website called Web Answers. The site closed down and doesn't exist anymore. On that website you earned ad revenue for answering questions. Apparently a few people made good money from answering many questions.

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            eugbugposted 6 years agoin reply to this

            Yes, that's right. I answered over 4000 questions there. Didn't back them all up though and only a few are accessible on the WayBack Machine. Fixya was even better. Their "Marketplace" earning program allowed you to setup a service (a bit like Fiverr.com) and suggest a fee for a question to be answered or troubleshooting info to be provided. This was typically $10. A user would pay the fee beforehand, but could get their money back if they weren't satisfied. I had a service for finding difficult to source product manuals and got requests nearly every day.

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      EricFarmer8xposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Because on desktop installing ad blocking software is so easy now. It is only Android browsers that tend to not have it. But even then there are some ad blocking web browsers on Android you can use.
      
      It sucks but you can never expect all views to be ad revenue. Last time I checked myself about half or so of my views were seeing ads.

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   eugbugposted 6 years ago

   I've put the suggestion into five articles. It'll be interesting to see if there's any change in impressions (at least from returning readers).

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