AdSense and Norton Internet Security

Norton Firewall = public service ads

[valley]

When comparing data for views and click rate you should be aware that if a visitor runs NIS ( all 3 types of NIS, with ad blocking enabled, which most do have as default when the firewall is on), Adsense still functions but comes up as standard public service ads (psa) which produces no revenue but counts as view.
I do believe this is the case with many other ad blocking .

Ad blocking software is run by 15 to 20% of surfers .
Toolbars have it (that's google toolbar as well).
It would be interesting to see if AdSense is going to find a way around it.

[John_Shaw]

Is there a way for a content site to cause NIS to "think" that the most important parts of the content are ads and are thereby blocked? A notice on the site would inform the reader that in order to read the content the ad block must be off. Enough of the content would be available to get the reader's interest, but the key information would be blocked by ad block software. For example, the beginning of a very good joke would be available; the punch line would be blocked.

[jonknee]

I doubt Google's own toolbar blocks AdSense ads. That would be crazy.

[websiteowner]

I did a little tinkering around about a year ago when I had Norton installed and found that some of the settings will munge the referring URL (it was replaced by a WEFERER header iirc).

Any sites that rely on a referring URL for thier scripts to work properly will have problems whenever visitors using Norton configured to munge referring URLs visit the site. Scripts that have been working for years can suddenly stop working as a result... if you've been having trouble with scripts that work for some visitors and not others - perhaps you should ask those who can't get it to work if they use Norton "out of the box".

I suspect the reason that visitors running Norton will see more public service ads is because Google have no idea what page the code was on...

As for a solution, there is no immediate answer - we can either wait until Google implement another way of getting other ads (perhaps passing the referring URL in the URL itself for situations when HTTP_REFERER fails)... or try to educate visitors to expose more of their online browsing habits (unlikely).

[simonuk]

What really annoys me is the power of advertising. Norton has always been a bug ridden, problem causing nightmare and yet people still go out of their way to buy their software.

I do a lot of software and OS repairs and I've lost count the amount of times I've cured 100% of the problems by uninstalling Norton and installing something else like AVG.

Norton blocking adsense ads is going to be waaaaaay down their list of things to look into but you can at least feel happier in the knowledge that chances are while they are surfing your site their Norton infected PC will crash ;)

</sarcasim>

Simon.

[loxly]

I use the google toolbar and don't have ANY adsense ads being blocked or causing them to be all psa's. I get normal AdSense ads on all pages of my own and of sites that I visit....

[valley]

Thanks for the google toolbar info, more about Norton here

[webmasterworld.com...]

Adsense is displaying but it is unclickable.

Are the PSA still clickable?