How to cope with ad blockers

When Apple added an API for blocking ads on the iPhone and Mac, a whole host of blockers were released. This caused a large drop in ad impressions for a lot of websites. This drop in ad impressions resulted in the obvious drop in sales and revenue. A websites are ad-supported and will not survive without that revenue. For sites that do rely on ad revenue there are several ways to get around ad blockers:

Paid content

Some webmasters have opted to move their best content into subscriber only areas. Visitors will now have to get membership on that site in order to view premium content. Some content remains free, usually a single weekly article. All other content is moved behind a paywall. This approach will not work for all sites. Some audiences are more inclined to pay for their content than others. Health and fitness sites for example have visitors who are more likely to pay for content than say news readers.

Block Content

There are scripts that can detect ad blockers and then hide content. This may seem like an extreme reaction, however, for sites that have no option but to use display ads for revenue this is one way of readers adding your site to a whitelist. Once on the whitelist ads on your sites will show.

Ad networks

Googles AdSense network is universally maligned for being one of the more privacy invasive of the networks. For a website with an audience that takes its privacy very seriously, then another option is to switch to another ad network. People who use Apple devices tend to be more conscious of their privacy and sites that focus on that traffic will do well to switch to a more acceptable ad network that has already been whitelisted.