Re: Ad-blocking continued.

From: Petteri Pyyny <webmaster_at_afterdawn.com>
Date: Fri 24 May 2002 09:27:51 -0600

>Further to the recent conversation about ad-blocking and
>how we can try to protect our business, I found the
>following link off the phpadsnew SourceForge site.
>http://www.antiadbuster.com
>Available as a simple include for PHP and ASP, it seems to
>work solely based on user-agent, identifying the following
>UAs as ad-blockers,
<SNIP..>
>Now, this obviously doesn't deal with a number of alternative
>methods for ad-blocking, eg: .lmhosts and .host file
>redirection, firewall/gateway filtering and other methods
>which do not amend or change the user-agent.

Working as a developer of the AntiAdBuster's CFM version,
I thought the same first when I saw the original PHP version,
but taking a deeper look into the code shows its pretty clever
additional blocking mechanism which virtually eliminates all
attempts to block ads, provided that the ad blocker is
sophisticated enough to parse certain types of ads -- if this
is the case, the ad blocking will be busted (some sites who
use the script simply send the users who use adblockers to
sites where they _really_ have to have adblockers, i.e.
porn popup jungles :-).

Obviously there are tons of ways around this "problem", but
I see it as a way to prevent 90% of the adblocker users to
view my site. The rest 10%, who are willing to take an additional
step in order to block the ads, are the guys who wouldn't buy
anything from the advertisers even if they were offered to get
a BMW X5 for $1.99. Obviously they're annoying anyway, since
they "steal" your bandwidth, but web is not a perfect place,
not even close :-) According to my stats, only appx. 1-2% of
users actually use the ad blockers -- this obviously changes
from site to site, but my audience is pretty darn technologically
sophisticated and they're (IMHO) more likely to ban ads than
Joe "AOL" Average.

-Petteri Pyyny
http://AfterDawn.com/

(btw. I currently use "relaxed" version of aab on my main site,
which only checks for user_agent -- for slightly more "paranoid"
version, you can grab it from the antiadbuster's website)






Received on Fri May 24 2002 - 10:27:51 CDT