Dealing with advertisement blockers
Words by Daniel Aleksandersen on 2006-06-20
Many Web browsers ship with built in advertisement blocking features and many users uses extensions and sepparat software as well.
The point being: some readers block advertisement. And from a designers view; this will cause serious problems with open spaces.
Preventing readers from blocking content is near to impossible. Dealing with the open space left where the advertisement should have been is not.
Use CSS to define exactly how high and wide the ad space is. Next; apply a background-image stored localy, preferably at the sites top level domain or the general image location to avoid geting blocked easily, to the open space. This way the general advertisement will be displayed at the top of the alternate advertisement.
Avoiding general advertisement sizes on the image is prefered. Remove a pixel or two from the width and height, and by placing it in the site's general image folder - it should not be blocked as easily as general advertisement. And by including it via CSS it is much harder, not impossible - but harder, to block.
Some limitations do apply which have to be considdered carefully. The advertisement will not be clickable. So it has to be more like regular news paper advertisement.
Under are a couple of example of such:
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Make a deal with a thirdparty Website, or use the space to promote the sites features. Using the space as a way to strengthen the sites brand could be as valuable as an actual advertisement.
And a warning at the end: Some sites displays big, blinking images when the actual advertisment has been blocked. Just do not do that to the visitor. They might turn of their advertisement blocker to avoid it. But they will probabilly avoid the Website instead.
3 comments
Haha.. Some nifty tricks you got there. But Adblock with Adblock Filterset.G Updater does remove the most of all spam
Birger at 2006-06-21 @004.
With Opera, you can addblock even background images so I'm not sure this'll work all the time.
D at 2006-08-03 @520.
Many advertisement and content blockers can block background images as well. But the user must still have to take action to block this image. Most users are not to be bothered with doing so.
Daniel at 2006-08-03 @683.
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