There’s been all sorts of arguing about adblock lately. It started a few weeks ago when the site Why Firefox is Blocked got Dugg. This guy equates using Adblock to stealing. Are you kidding me? For those of you who don’t know, Adblock is a Firefox extension that completely gets rid of most ads, substantially cleaning up your internet experience. I love Adblock. I know a lot of you are thinking, "Why the hell would an internet marketer, who bases a good portion of his income off of internet advertising, be promoting the use of Adblock?"
Let me break it to you. People running Adblock, for the most part, are ad-blind anyway. They know what Google Adsense ads look like. So much so, that they’ve installed an extension to block them. Therefore, they probably weren’t going to click on your ad anyway. This helps us.
What? Helps us? How? Well, if you were smart, you’d be using several different techniques to monetize your blog. That way, the ads that people weren’t going to click in the first place are now out of the way. Now the people blocking the adsense ads have less clutter on their screen and they can pay more attention to your other features. So how do you make money?
Here’s a short list:
- Text-link-ads: Several benefits here. First of all, if you’ve got links on your page, they’re certainly not getting blocked by adblock. Why? Because they’re Text Links. They’re not affiliate links, they’re not coming from ads.google.com or anything similar. They’re just plain links. This is also guaranteed money because you get paid monthly rather than per action. Adblockers will still click these links. They don’t look fishy. They don’t have "?refid=539528038" in the URL. So those links will get popular and you can charge more for them.
- Affiliate links: If you aren’t using affiliate links on your blog, you’re missing the boat. I’ve seen much better profits from affiliate programs than from Adsense all across the board on all of my sites. At the very least you should be an Amazon affiliate. Shopzilla also just started a very progressive affiliate program. If your affiliate links are still getting blocked, just use simple php cloaking (I’ll write a quick tutorial about how to do this next week).
- Sell your own products: Yes. I’m telling you to come up with your own product. Gasp! I have to think? You mean I shouldn’t be making money off my lame MFA sites? It’s not that hard. Write an eBook. Make a Wordpress theme. Write a simple tool, like the one in my sidebar that tells you how much your blog is worth. That’s a very simple script, but the guy’s blog has gotten huge traffic because of it.
- Find a niche with people who don’t use adblock: You must realize that the more tech-savvy people who are using adblock don’t make up a huge portion of the internet. Look at Plenty of Fish. What an ugly site. But it earns huge dollars, because it’s marketing to a less techie group, who don’t know the difference between an ad and a real link.
I’m not gonna lie. I’ve been using Adblock for years. I love it. It gives me a cleaner experience. If I go to a site that looks good, once in a while I’ll whitelist it, but mostly just to take a look at their ad placement and blending.
You have to realize, though. I’m not your target audience if you’re looking to make money off of Adsense. But I will buy a product through an affiliate link if I read a good review. You just need to realize who you’re marketing to, and STOP WHINING.
Update: The Adblock Plus blog just posted an article that echoes a lot of the points I made. Basically, webmasters need to focus on content before advertising, and it will pay off in the end.
13 Comments
Very nice article. I’ve used affiliate marketing and I have earn’t a lot more than I have from adsense.
James
http://www.thepowellblog.com
>>Therefore, they probably weren’t going to click on your ad anyway.
I have a seo blog and my audience are SEOs, and they click anyway cause they see interesting ads and they don’t care about “they make money for me”. Because they understand that one person doesn’t change the whole statistics for some hundreds visitors per day. You are wrong.
Nice article, thank you. I was thinking along the same lines myself when I saw the whole Adblock discussion and I am still going to write it down - quite a few points will be similar to the ones in your post.
Nice article, agree on most of it. I had actually given up on the internet as a source of information or entertainment for a while.
FireFox and AdBlock made me come back and actually begin - visiting other more or less random sites again instead of just sticking with the usual 20 sites I always check up on. Now, i’ve republished my website, having fun and will not worry about advertising overload in my poor little head.
If people want to make money from the internet, they will have to begin thinking in quality, creativity and concepts, instead of just twenty thousand pages with sixty thousand ads, which are all based on syndicated content.
God I love Adblock as well. It makes for a completely new browsing experience and I cant imagine not using it.
Exactly! These webmasters who are attacking Adblocker and Firefox users are following the tried and true method of the RIAA and MPAA. They had a money stream that worked, and once technology began to put power in the hands of the consumers they got pissed!
I agree that the answer isn’t banning people from you site, then you don’t even git a hit from their visit. The answer is finding new and better ways to do things. Don’t stagnate because that’s the way things were always done, find ways that no only force feed ads to people, but present revenue producers that people will WANT to participate in.
forex trader: TARGET AUDIENCE. You have an SEO blog. They’re INTERESTED in advertising and the likes. They wouldn’t be blocking ads anyway. I know what I want and it’s not ads all over the place. It doesn’t matter how cool a website is, because I’m not going to click some add to buy crap when I don’t want it. Even before AdBlock, I never clicked banner ads or the like. Most AdBlock users would agree.
Content before advertising is 100% the way to go. Make your site meaningful and people will be willing to donate, buy from you, etc. If you are respected in your area, people will be willing to trust your opinions and go to affiliates you recommend.
Great comments. I was thinking about how similar this is to the RIAA/MP3 debate when I wrote the post, but I didn’t want to compare Adblockers to pirates.
It might also be helpful to just accept the fact that everyone in the world isn’t going to get paid for writing in their diary.
Trackback & Pingback