Bucaro TecHelp
HTTPS Encryption not required because no account numbers or
personal information is ever requested or accepted by this site

About BTH User Agreement Privacy Site Map Contact News Feeds

Code to Block the Ad Blockers

By Stephen Bucaro

A June 2015 report revealed that there are 45 million U.S. and 198 million worldwide users with ad blockers installed in their browsers, costing webmasters an estimated $22 billion. I don't blame users for configuring an ad blocker in their browser. Nowadays internet advertising is getting abusive, with too many banners, too many popups, and too many video ads sucking up their mobile bandwidth.

I stated decades ago when the Web was new that shoving a popup ad in your web site visitors faces was disrespectful. And pushing bandwidth burdensome video advertising is just ripping off your visitors. Why do webmasters do it? Greed. And then when it causes web users to avoid the webmaster's site what do they do? More popups, more video advertising. Webmasters - get it together.

On the other hand some webmasters work hard to research and prepare information for their website's visitors and by using an ad blocker their visitors are preventing these webmasters from earning a living. How would these ad blocker users like it if webmasters went to their place of work and prevented them from earning a living?

One way to prevent your ads from being blocked is to pay the developer of the ad blocking application to remove your URL from their black list. In other words - extortion. Don't do it. There is also web site software that blocks the ad blocker software. You have a race between the ad blockers and the ad blocker blockers. All at the expense of webmasters.

The ad blocker blocker software creators advance their product and immediately the ad blocker software developers advance their product to bypass the new software. I don't think anyone is going to develop software that blocks the ad blockers, simply because the ad blockers have control of the users browsers. But there is a way webmasters can boot ad blocker users off their Web sites.

I don't believe webmasters should have to work for free, and viewing a few banners is a very low cost for information that webmasters worked hard to research and prepare. In this article I provide code to boot ad blocker users off your Web site.

The first thing you need to do is create a target web page to dump the offending users to. That Web page should feature an explanation of why they were dumped. I placed a counter on my dump page so that I can monitor how many users are getting dumped.

The code I'm proving uses JavaScript. So the next thing you need to do is dump users who have JavaScript disabled in their browsers. Do that by placing the following html code in the head section of your Web page, preferably just below the title tag.

<noscript><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2000; url=http://bucarotechelp.com/search/unblock.asp" /></noscript>

This code redirects users with JavaScript disabled in their browsers to your dump page. Replace the link to my dump page with your link. The 2000 in the content attribute means they will be redirected after 2 seconds. I put this delay in so users can see what they're missing, and to avoid a problem with search robots.