PlugRush starts campaign against Adblockers

PlugRush is starting a campaign to educate Internet users about the consequences of using Adblock browser extensions.

Adblock is increasingly becoming a problem for websites that rely on advertisement as their main source of revenue. Users with Adblock installed in their browsers are leeching bandwidth and server resources, and are a big problem for sites that have ad revenue as it's primary revenue stream. For the average website around 5-10% of the users have Adblock installed. On a global scale more than 200 million users have enabled the popular browser extension.

For many websites it can become a substantial cost to allow these users to have access to the site without contributing anything at all to increased revenue

. Many website is forced to use more intrusive methods to generate income.

In an effort to combat the rising amount of Internet users who install Adblock, the team at PlugRush has developed some tools to both educate and monetize these users. A campaign has been started at removeadblock.com to inform users and get them to disable or remove their Adblock extensions. Publishers can install a small script on their website that detects if a user have Adblock installed and will show them a warning, prevent access to the content, and give them instructions on how to turn Adblock off.

Our goal is to educate users about the negative consequences Adblock has on a free Internet, and hopefully make an impact on the amount of users who install the extension in their favorite browser.

PlugRush's managing partner Thomas Pedersen:

I was shocked when I saw the statistics on how many of our users are blocking all our ads. It's growing rapidly and it is killing the free Internet as we know it. There has to be some way to change this. That's when we came up with the Remove Adblock campaign.

In addition to educating the users, PlugRush publishers can make money on these users by choosing to redirect Adblock users to paid campaigns if the users still decides to not disable or remove their Adblock extensions. Just because these users don't see ads, doesn't mean you can't sell them things. If they don't want to see ads, we have to redirect them directly to the products we want to sell. Tests show that this type of users are no different than other users when it comes to sales ratios.