Adblocking – History, Impacts, Techniques and Countermeasures.
On Chris' suggestion I'm going to start a thread to discuss ad-blocking as it effects web publishers. Someday I might turn this into a formal article, but for now I'll frame it in the forum of a forum discussion.
I have been researching ad-blocking and ways to counter ad-blocking since late 2003 and first implemented tactics designed to deny access to my website http://EnvironmentalChemistry.com by people were blocking my ads in early 2004. I have participated in countless ad-blocking discussions both in webmaster forums and in ad-blocking type forums. Depending upon who you talk to, I am either the villain or the hero when it comes to this issue.
As the topic of ad-blocking is huge, I'm going to break my discussion of this topic into several parts. This will allow discussion to take place while I write the next section. While I don't plan on giving people exact code to implement on their site, I will provide enough theory and explanation for people to design their own ad-blocking countermeasures by the end of this thread. Also for the purposes of this discussion I am going to totally ignore any and all issues surrounding popup/popunder ads and focus exclusively on on-page advertising (e.g. traditional banner ads).
The reason I won't be giving out exact code is that in order for ad-blocking countermeasures to be effective, each site's code must be unique. If everyone were to use the same code to detect and block ad-blocking users, it would create too large of an incentive to expend considerable resources to defeat that one set of countermeasures. By everyone developing unique code sets that function differently, it creates too many targets for those who would like to circumvent ad-blocking countermeasures to reliably overcome.
Part 1: History
Contrary to what some would like to believe, ad-blocking software and techniques have been around for almost as long as there have been banner ads. In fact I remember a program called JunkBuster from back in the 1995-1996 timeframe. Back then ad-blocking was pretty much used exclusively by those with the skill sets required to deploy those early ad-blocking techniques. What really made ad-blocking easier was when the IAB standardized on specific dimensions for banner ads (e.g. 468x60) thus making it much easier to detect ads.
As with so many forms of advertising from early on, banner advertising become an ever escalating screaming match with advertisers assaulting users with ever more obnoxious ads that flashed, jumped, pulsed, etc. in an effort to get the attention of users. The more obnoxious ads became the more desperate users became to find ways to stop the assault on their eyes. Instead of recognizing how annoying their ads were becoming, some advertisers simply tried find ever more aggressive ways to get around ad-blocking software and force users to pay attention to them.
Eventually this "arms" race lead to the current generation of ad-blocking programs and plug-ins that are highly effective, easy to deploy and easy to maintain. Today if a user really wants to, they can surf the web virtually ad-free using any of dozens of ad-blocking solutions. These solutions include extensions for the Firefox web browser like AdBlock, easy to install software based proxies like AdSubract and security applications like Symantec Norton Internet Security and ZoneAlarm Pro.
Next: part 2 – The impacts of ad blocking on websites.
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. Please do better than mook-jon with subsequent parts though 
Originally Posted by Vinnie
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