Adblock Plus Acceptable Ads for Amazon Links (1 Viewer)

To the forum owners: I notice that you guys have a problem with adblockers hiding your Amazon affiliate links. Since the most popular adblocker is Adblock Plus, there is a solution to this issue. I did a quick search and couldn't find any discussion of this to date, so apologies if you've already discussed this.

Basically you can apply to have those Amazon links whitelisted as part of the Adblock Plus Acceptable Ads policy. I recently went through the process for my site TweakGuides.com and it was fairly simple. You submit an application (see bottom of the page linked above), sign an agreement, and a few days later you're automatically added to the built-in whitelist in ABP.

Now some of the ads on this site won't get past the acceptable ads criteria that ABP has, such as the animated ads, but if you explicitly restrict your ABP application to only having the Amazon links whitelisted, I feel you won't have any problems. That way you should get more people seeing and hopefully using them.

I've given up on Adblockers for the past year or so, in part to make sure that sites I value like HTF continue to get the ad funding they need. Unfortunately the bad actors are making me reconsider that all the time. I'd hate to see HTF penalized for the jerkiness of others, but such a compromise sounds like a good start to me. I don't know much about what PI suggests but anything that helps HTF continue to get paid rocks in my book.

Thanks a lot for mentioning this. We do try to make ads as unobtrusive as we can for logged in members, but it's a balancing act. We do try our best to keep the money flowing so we can add functionality. We have a lot we'd love to do but can't target all at once.

No problem. It's understandable that all ads can't be completely unobtrusive, because basically it would defeat the purpose of advertising if it was effectively invisible to readers and hence unseen and unclicked. But the reality is that most people these days use adblockers, and unfortunately I doubt they'll disable them entirely just to support a few sites. As Sam says, there are just too many bad sites with incredibly annoying ads to make that possible. Whenever I browse the Internet on my iPad using its default Safari browser which has no adblocker, it's just awful the amount and type of ads I see compared to my PC's Firefox+Adblock Plus combo.

The reason I made the suggestion for HTF is that you guys don't have obtrusive advertising as such, but the Amazon affiliate links in particular are actually very useful to people. By applying to Adblock Plus and having them universally whitelist those links at the very least, it means the majority of people will see the links by default without needing to disable adblock or do anything else.

Another alternative is that in the text that is usually posted above the affiliate link, you link to a separate page which provides people with the step-by-step method to add whitelisting code to Adblock Plus.

Something like the following (this example is for Firefox):


First you'd change the standard text above affiliate links as follows:

The link below will take you directly to the product on Amazon. If you are using an adblocker you will not see link, so follow these steps.

You can also add the link to these instructions at various places throughout HTF to alert people to this method in general.

Then on a separate page you provide full details of how to only whitelist Hometheaterforum in Adblock Plus for people who are interested in doing so, e.g.:

If you see the red ABP button, click on it and select 'Disable on hometheaterforum.com', then reload the site.

If you can't see the button, you can manually add a filter to prevent ABP from working on HTF:

1. Go to the Add-ons Manager in your browser (e.g. Press the Firefox button, and select Add-ons).
2. Click the Options button for the Adblock Plus add-on.
3. Click the 'Filter preferences' button.
4. Select the 'Custom filters' tab.
5. Click the 'Add filter group' button.
6. Enter the following text, and press Enter:

Exception Rules

7. Click the 'Add filter' button at the top right, enter the following text and press Enter:

@@||hometheaterforum.com^$document

8. Click close, then reload the site.

This will allow you to continue to use Adblock Plus as normal, but the ads on HTF will now be shown. Thanks for your support.

Click to expand...

Anyway just a thought as to how you could approach it. I think the HTF audience is mature enough to understand that allowing the ads on HTF will help support the site without causing any real annoyance.