User blog comment:Tedgill/Making Ads Better: How We're Going to Do It/@comment-5797887-20170120225223

As a site owner myself, who monetizes and survives using advertisement, I can completely understand the feeling for approaches like this. There are however a lot of mistakes being approached here that suggest the decision makers are inexperienced in monetizing adspace at the expense of the user experience.

In the past few weeks, as I attempt to use the page, I have seen multiple different styles of adblock removal request pops, some that can be closed popping at the bottom, and some that eclipse the entire screen and effectively prevent access to the site without disabling adblock entirely. The latter approach of this is you telling your users full stop that they cannot utilize the content they themselves provide for you, free of charge, unless you force them to play by your rules, and get squeezed for advertisement money.

Your advertisers pay for impressions, but only if those impressions are valuable. People who disable ads using adblock are not going to click on your ads. They find them annoying enough to proactively disable them across the internet as a whole.

There are a portion of people who block them because of things like pop-up ads, video ads, or audio ads, especially those that auto play. These are all ads your site has in the past utilized and by the sounds of it will continue to utilize, and they deter from the user experience. Forcing your audience to subject to these will not increase your revenue, it will cannibalize your userbase and you will cease to be a "top 20 site".

Instead of an aggressive approach, consider appropriately encouarging a whitelisting of your site to those who block it, and upon achieving a whitelist, present yourselves as worthy of being whitelisted. There is nothing inherently wrong with a video ad, as long as it doesn't Auto play. There is nothing wrong with a significant amount of programmatic ads either, as long as they don't detract from the content at hand. Wikia has a lot of screen space, and the content itself only occupys a central portion.

I can understand a desire for faster load times, but that's easily achieved through a JS defer. You should be prioritizing more-so on making your sites work on mobile as that market continues to grow. Your consistently diminishing mobile apps are a much bigger problem than people adblocking your site.

The user experience comes first. The trust and admiration of your audience is the one thing that keeps your site alive, and proactively taking steps to push them away in pursuit of bigger profits should be a last resort effort. It's not worth increasing your revenue by two fold per person, if you lose two thirds of your user base in the process.