AdTrap - A THREAT to Internet Marketing?

I don't think thousands will buy this...I mean, $139 for an ad-blocker? Most people will just put up with the pain of a few adverts on the side...Right?

I don't believe it will have any impact, maybe slight but nothing significant.

When you see the likes of Intel integrate this directly into motherboards, then it's time to panic. I doubt that will happen though.

There's already plenty of online solutions without buying expensive hardware to block ads. There's Ghostery and Noscript which are simple browser plugins that do the trick for free. If you don't feel the impact of those, I doubt that you have anything to worry about. People who don't want to see ads or be tracked on the Internet with tracking cookies aren't really the type of people who would be clicking on your ads anyway.

The only ads that annoy me are pop-up ads. Other than that, I wouldn't pay money and take on more complications just to block some advertisements. Likewise, I think most people wouldn't either.

Product placement will become more important in days to come. I feel that too many ads are so annoying. Humor ads we like, but do not want any screamers.

I find it funny that AdTrap has to advertise in order to sell AdTrp.

You know the sites that will shut off or become premium because of such stuff? Let me give you a hint.

GOOGLE.COM
Facebook.com
CNN.com
Yahoo.com
MSN.com

And more and more!

Advertising is what keeping everything up and running rite now online.

I dont think it will have a huge impact there are just way too sites Isnt there plugins for chrome to block ads?

It sucks that they'll help kill what could essentially help their other businesses..

But no way. People would rather see ads than pay $139. PLus I'm sure coders could come up with another way around it and send them back to the crowdfunding for some more cash to update.. That would be cool... :-)

So Adtrap is not going to advertise their device online. At least they
are getting free exposure on CNN.

On the other hand, not bad for a high school dropout.

-Ray Edwards

Unless this comes packaged with something, I'd doubt we'd ever have anything to worry about. Believe it or not this will be a really good thing for internet marketers. Maybe they will find a way to start treating things like affiliate marketing like it's a real business. Regardless, as marketers our job is to adapt so I welcome such challenges.

Those who block ads don't want to see them anyways so who does it really affect?

It makes me sick to see the people commenting at the bottom of that article and claiming that advertising is evil and people who spend time and money creating quality content should just do it for the fun of it.

People need to make a living from this sort of thing and these idiots ridicule sites that use ads to make money.

I'd like to see their faces if all ads were blocked for everybody on the internet and nearly all of the sites they use go offline indefinitely.

They'd have nowhere to look like idiots then.

THIS IS GOOD NEWS. It will push advertisers to be more creative and sell through INTERACTION, ENGAGEMENT, and yes, CONTENT. There are other ways to sell than through ads.

well we already knew this is coming ,people do not like ads and that is a fact

I'm not getting into whether this is right or wrong, as I don't think such things matter when it comes to third parties making decisions you cannot control.

However, pretty much everyone I know in the offline world uses the free Chrome plugin that already does everything this is supposed to do, and they have been using it for years.

Many online streaming video sites have already faced this problem, and as a viewer of such sites I can explain how they have gotten around it. If I go to watch something on Putlocker it shows me a notice saying that I cannot view their content as I have AdBlocker enabled. To continue watching videos on their site I needed to whitelist them in the Chrome plugin.

I wanted to keep watching the videos so I whitelisted them. As they are clever they gave me several warning notices that this would happen before I was locked out, and after each warning notice I was redirected to the video I had intended to watch. This meant that when I was finally locked out I was already expecting that I'd need to whitelist them, and I was used to the idea.

Hope this helps.

Statistically speaking, very few people will buy this.

Those who do - the ones who hate ads so much that they would buy an ad blocker - wouldn't be clicking them anyway.

It changes nothing.

The funniest part of all of this will be when this same company who makes this software is advertising online via banners that they claim they will block - if it's not happening already.

yeah most people have ad blindness anyway and won't shell out the cash for something like this. Probably geared toward businesses.

I wouldn't be to concerned. After all if they're willing to spend the money to block the ads then they probably weren't gonna be interested in your ad anyway.

Chad

"AdBlock" is a free download and it's been available for a few years I think. This new "AdTrap" device is basically the same thing, except that it works on all devices connected to your wifi & they're charging over $100 for it.
A ton of people already have Adblock installed.
It's mostly used by tech enthusuasts, though. If you're in the gaming niche or tech niche, then AdBlock will have a significant effect.

Maybe I'm missing something... But, what is hardware without software installed on the hardware? Software and programs geared at blocking ads can already be worked around and allow you to still monetize your site by targeting those users who have said software installed.

Adblock Plus for example... For those users who have this plugin installed, there are already other plugins which work around this. The sky is not falling.

There is a long debate on this subject that is going on for 7 years. ( when adblock for firefox was first introduced ).

Since, the webmasters are fearing that they might lose their income. I have been involved in many discussions about this, which includes: discussion about if it is worth to block visitors who use adblock software, so if they can't view ads then they shouldn't view the website, discussions about how to get past adblock, or how to force visitors to disable adblock for your website so they can see the content, discussions to start building campaings to let people know if they use adblock they probably force bloggers to go out of business, etc.

After so many years of debates and hating, the best solution that I can think of and probably the most webmasters who are having success right now adopted, is to stop worrying about this. Yes, successful internet marketers don't give a **** about adblock. You may end up spending more time hating adblock and trying to find stupid solutions si you will forget why you started the blog or website in the first place.

I could start to explain and demote every method that Internet Marketers tought to trick adblock, but the conclusion will be the same. The less you worry, the better for you. Anyway ads are paying low. According to the adblock producers, 3 out of 10 internet users have adblock software. If right now you make 1$ for every 1000 page views on your ads, if adblock stops working tomorrow how much you will make ? Mathematically, you will make around 1,3 to 1,4$ for every 1000 visitors. Well, that still sucks when you read that success marketers are making 20$-50$ for every 1000 visitors to their page. ( I'm not wrong, there are people wo make over 100$ from every 1000 visitors; do some math, you promote digital affiliate products; your commission is 40$, is that hard to make a sale from 1000 visitors? actually the conversion rate is way higher than that ). Back to our adblock deal: Practically your revenues will increase from $1 to $1.10 at best, because all those people who decided it is time to use adblock are already ad blind and if your site have too many ads they leave right away, so actually the increase might be 0.

Sooner or later, you will move from displaying ads to: email marketing, affiliate sales, product sales, lead generation, subscription based website, etc. So, why to spend your time worrying about getting 0.10$ more from your website.

I want to write something about the reasons why people use adblock and why webmasters hate people using adblock.

Well, from the webmaster point of view you probably are thinking about this stuff:
- you provide the content for free
- you want to make some money so you continue to provide it for free
- you think that if there are no ad money you will stop providing the content
- you hate adblock because people see your content "for free"
- you think at displaying ads as a fair exchange: they have to see ads so they can see your content.

First of all, displaying ads is not the purpose why you started your blog. You started your blog because you have knowledge in your field and you wanted to share it with the people. If there are people reading you then you will get social credits from this, people will follow you, will ask you questions, will start considering you authority, you will get free publicity. At some point you may think that displaying ads is a way to compensate your efforts. Well, it is an option, but there are dozens of options to leverage your knowledge and your popularity. People will start to ask for you help, you can make money from consultation, promote affiliate offers, take donations, build a forum and answer questions on it, build a coaching program. If you cannot do any of these, it means that you did not invested enough if your blog or website, and you accidentally got some traffic from search engines and you want to make the most out of it until it goes away. Or, you built some "niche sites" with some generic content and you want to get some money just for redirecting people.

If you still think that your content is so valuable, then ask for money from visitors because they read your content. Or write an ebook and sell it. Most successful Internet Marketers found out that the content is a vehicle to drive traffic to something better, not the product itself, unless they are releasing a book, or some premium reports. As I said, if you still think that your content is so valuable, try to sell it, and write some free non-premium content so you can drive traffic to your landing page where you sell that "valuable content". I bet that you can't do this because you know too that you content is crap and you probably used some automatic software to create it based on some high traffic keywords and other "adsense optimzed" ones so you can make more money displaying ads.

If you think that the visitors should not see your content "for free", without seeing ads, try to ask them to remove the adblock and see what is happening. I am sure that all will consider that you content is not worth it.

As many are saying, probably those who have adblock installed will never click those ads.

From the adblock user point of view:
- He assumes that your content should be free and everything on the web should be free
- He assumes that you are stealing his money and you get rich if he clicks on your ads
- He is really annoyed but most websites who display overlay ads that are very hard to get rid of.
- He thinks that the web is cleaner without ads
- Generally he thinks that he should get everything for free and all who try to charge something is a thief.

I am also annoyed about some websites. Sometimes it is so hard to find the close button because it is so small and in an unusual position. Some websites have some annoying overlay ads and whenever you want to go to your mouse to the top of your browser, an ad appears over the whole website. Sometimes you can't evel close that ad because after you click on the close button, the mouse remains over the same ad and expands immediately. If those type of ads were never used probably adblock wouldn't existed today.

Usually, torrent and other file sharing websites are using complete annoying ads. "Download" button everywhere so you hit the right one after 3 times. 5 pop-up windows open at the same time. you have to click "download" 4 times to get to the real download link. Probably because the regular adblock user wants something for free, they are feel better to use adblock instead of stop using those websites.

I am annoyed by ads too, but I stop using that website instead of using adblock software. Sometimes I like to read ads. I want to keep an open eye and not close inside myself. Read more about "self-absorbed" and you will find more about this type of people who want to look only ahead and never left or right. There are many good services that I found from google adsense ads. For example: optimizely, dashfolio, hasoffers, impact radius, iweb, fruition, and many more small and startup services.

If all internet users were self absorbed and all of them would have used adblocker, then probably the web was not so rich as it is right now. It is true that 90% of the content on the web is crap, there are enough good websites who are using ad revenue as their only source of income and still providing very good and original content. I am thinking about small news, opinion on rumour websites who will never make it so big that they can get money to advertise products but they still have something to say in the field. Most websites that are big enough right now to get rid of ads, were smaller at the beginning. If there was no ad revenue for the first years until they got big, then probably they would have never make it to the top.


Conclusions:
- Even if ads might give you some heads up and motivation, thinking about a better monetization method from the beginning of a websites life will be much better for your website and for your pocket. When I started my web development blog, I had about 100 visitors a day and still made about $200 a month from affiliate marketing. Ad revenues were around 10$. It is truth that displaying ads make your website look spammy. I removed the ads and revenues and traffic went up. Displaying ads might be a red alert for direct ad buyers. I am selling sponsored posts from 50 to 150$, and I would have probably scared those ad buyers if they saw ads on my website. Why spend that much on a post when they could have brought advertising on my website from adwords for pennies.
- Adblock won't kill the internet. There will be enough people getting started on the internet. They won't bother to install an adblock software. Think about how much people are using internet explorer right now when firefox or chrome and they won't even try to install something else.
- There are so many monetization methods that you can forget about ads. You might say that when you start out and have low traffic you can't employ other strategies. But ask yourself, if you only get 30 visitors a day what can you do with the 2$ that you earn from adsense every month ? Is that really something to start-up with ? On the other hand, I have seen sites with 30-50 visitors a day who sold a product and still make 1 sale every 1 or 2 days. That will let them earn hundred of dollars every month. Try to think more about quality instead of quantity.

I use AdBlocker all the time on free streaming sites (simply because of the ludicrous number of ads those websites throw... literally if you bat your eyelids there's some script trying to make you enter a survey answer or something).

However, I disable it for sites I trust.

I think this went way offtopic..

I found something very nice today. Despite I am not using adblocker, maybe because I am using chromium under linux, I got this message from a website:

Parts of site failed to load...
If you are using an ad blocker addon, you should to disable it (it blocks more than ads and causes parts of the site to not work).

That's probably the best cure for people who use adblocker. I think that they will turn off adblocker at least for that website so they won't miss something. Seeing ads is not cool, but unable to see the whole website, what will they choose ?

Yes it will have a negative impact on internet marketing.

Adblock plus which is free also does the same thing. It blocks adsense ads as well as banners.

Even I myself use adblock plus.