4 ms·
It's actually not easy to detect adblock use. Popular ad blockers actively try to evade detection. If the intent is to let publishers decide whether to allow ad
by eli 11y ago
It's actually not easy to detect adblock use. Popular ad blockers actively try to evade detection. If the intent is to let publishers decide whether to allow adblock users or not, it should send an easily detectable flag.
- roma1n 11y agoWhy would a piece of software on my machine needlessly be under remote control ?
- a3n 11y agoIt wouldn't control anything on your machine. It allows the web site to control whether they send content to you or not. I use AB Edge. I've visited Reddit, they posted a "we notice you use an ad blocker, if you like us, please think about whitelisting us." They could have just refused to serve the content. Either way would have been acceptable; it's my browser and I control what I see, it's their content and they control where it goes. In that case I whitelisted Reddit. Nothing on Reddit remote-controlled my machine, it just initiated a brief "conversation."
- eli 11y agoUnfortunately for publishers, it's pretty hard to implement that sort of ad block detection reliably.
- tracker1 11y agoPut a div tag with a class of "ad" on it... then test it's display style property 100ms after the load event... For that matter, wrap your primary content in a div with a class of "ad" ... then users won't even see the content, and you can replace it with a notice to disable adblock and refresh the page.
- eli 11y agoI tried that: https://github.com/elidickinson/ad-block-test https://github.com/elidickinson/ad-block-test Much harder to get right than you'd think and if you're a big site it's worse: the block lists will be updated to "whitelist" your test ad. It's difficult for publishers to even accurately measure what impact ad blocking is having on their business.
- tracker1 11y agoFunny, I had no problem detecting this on a site with several million unique visitors a month... Of course I did the detection against my actual ad tags in the page...
- eli 11y agoWouldn't you be getting false positives from ads that are simply slow to load and false negatives from ad blockers that hide ads without using the "display" property?