Hi,

I'm Brett from Niche Laboratory. As well as building and maintaining this site I'm also an English teacher.

Tonight I was looking for some ideas for how to do a paraphrasing lesson. Of course I turned to Google to see what I could find on the subject.

I don't always automatically click on the 1st search result. I tend to scan the search results and if the question is answered by the excerpt then so much the better. But for a query such as "ESL paraphrasing lesson plan" it's unlikely that you could get the answer to this query straight away.

So I clicked through to what I thought was the most relevant result.

Anyway, I was really disappointed that the 3rd search result showed that "AdBlockers aren't welcome, please disable your adblock software now".

Now if the content is *really* valuable then I will disable my Adblock.

But an ESL teaching blog using it?

Gimme a break!

There is so much English teaching stuff online that all I had to do was to click on the 4th search result to find what I was looking for.

And the result of this?

Google will eventually demote the ad blocking checker site. The 4th site will rise up in the rankings.

Is it worth using the ad blocking checking software anyway? For a query such as mine I was very unlikely to click on an advert anyway. Always bear user intent in mind when you are writing any page on your site.

So I'll recommend you don't use ad blocking spotting scripts on your site.

What CAN you do?

My top tip is to put in more text based adverts. They actually convert a lot better anyway. People who read text are much more interested in the topic than those who just casually click on ads.

One other thought...

Would banning ad-blocking users make you more money? What percentage will actually disable their ad blocker? And how many potential useful visitors are you turning away? You know that I routinely link to interesting sites. But I NEVER link to those who show begging messages or disable access because they think I have an AdBlocker installed.

Over to you... What do you think of AdBlockers? Would you stop potential customers from using your site if you thought they might have AdBlock installed in their browser?