detecting Norton ad blocking

javascript tricks for detecting Norton ad blocking

[ChewingAluminumFoil]

You're probably aware that Norton blocks tons of advertising, robbing me of the revenue that pays for the hosting costs. Here's an overview of the trick I use to detect ad blocking on my game site <snip>. It's basically a "honeypot" approach. I place something that obviously appears to be an ad on the page and then detect whether it got loaded or not. Details:

On the main game page I have an 468x60 image at the bottom of the page named to have "ad" in the image name. This serves out of an 'ads' directory on another one of my domains. And there's a link around the image. This causes Norton to completely strip that HTML from the page. I set an ID on that image like <img id=idadload src="...">

Then from my main game javascript code I periodically check to see if that element ID 'idadload' is present in the page. If it's not, I tell the user after a few games that they're running ad blocking code and don't let them play anymore until they disable the feature in Norton (or whoever). They can always simply refresh the page at that point, but hey, at least they've been told and slightly impeded in their freeloading at <snip>

Sorry, I can't provide exact code because everyone's situation will be different, but the general approach should be applicable by anyone with good scripting abilities.

CAF

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 3:16 pm (utc) on May 10, 2006]
[edit reason] please - no urls. see tos. [/edit]

[ogletree]

Has anybody tried this kind of thing? Does it work?

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:33 pm (utc) on May 15, 2006]

[ChewingAluminumFoil]

With the impact in revenues to us small webmasters I thought this would be more widely discussed but I haven't found all that much about it.

I should note the approach I posted above actually didn't work with the latest Norton. They somehow now are a bit less aggressive about stripping out code that contains ad-like images that don't come from their blacklisted ad sites.

So I switched to using a technique, that being detecting the onload height of a div which wraps an ad. If that div doesn't inflate to at least the height of the ad I know the ad got blocked and I gently remind the user to turn off ad blocking after letting them play the game for a bit.

CAF

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:33 pm (utc) on May 15, 2006]

[edited by: eljefe3 at 11:50 pm (utc) on May 15, 2006]

[webdudek]

the second trick is very nice.
I like it.

In case you have adsense, you should also check if javascript is disabled and if it is, show a big red bold ugly warning explaining the user how to turn it on.