How to show different content from website server when AdBlock is detected?




Problem :

The ads you placed on your website are not showing up because they were blocked by browsers based plugin like AdBlock or AdBlock Plus. You want to find a way to detect Ad Blocker, block your content and show a message.... asking the user to disable or pause AdBlock.

How to do that with Javascript/Jquery js file and server side programming languages such as PHP, Ruby, Golang, Perl and web frameworks?

Solution :

For this tutorial, we use PHP as an example for this method and you can easily replace the PHP code with the programming language that you preferred.

  1. First, create a <div> where you will print out the content data.
  2. Next, evaluate the Javascript variable adblock and if the adblock value is TRUE then replace the <div id="content">'s innerHTML to whatever message you want to tell your visitors.

 <div id="content">
 <?php
 print $content;
 ?>
 </div>

 <script type="text/javascript">
 var adblock = true;
 </script>
 <script type="text/javascript" src="adframe.js"></script>
 <script type="text/javascript">
 if(adblock) {
 document.getElementById("content").innerHTML='<p>Hello, please disable Adblock and reload this page to see the content.</p>';
 }
 </script>

Content of adframe.js:

 adblock = false;

To test, please activate AdBlock and view this page. You should see the content is blocked until you turn off the AdBlock.

When better spears are around, better shields will come out .... and the cycle goes on and on....

UPDATE : One of the many ways to defeat this content blocking method is to view your page content in text only that are cached by Google or other search engines. Ya know, some visitors will go all the way just to get the content without pausing Adblocker. You can instruct the search engines not to cache your page content with one simple instruction in the robots.txt file

User-agent: * Noarchive: /

There are couple of more ways to defeat this content blocking method...but it is time for me to shut up now on this topic

Reference :

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18180598/ad-blocker-detection-aka-adblock-plus





By Adam Ng

IF you gain some knowledge or the information here solved your programming problem. Please consider donating to the less fortunate or some charities that you like. Apart from donation, planting trees, volunteering or reducing your carbon footprint will be great too.


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