Ad blockers - interesting note

CheeseDeluxe · February 16, 2021, 8:34pm

I'm coding a new website that highlights some of my Hype-created banner selects. When I tested my site with ad blockers turned on, all of my banners were getting blocked.

The banners are embedded in the pages (not iframed) so I figured the blockers were picking up on click tags or maybe even because they're standard banner ad sizes, but nope.

By process of elimination, it turns out they were getting blocked because a couple of my CSS classes that I wrapped the banners in used the word "ad" in them. That's seems crazy, but all I did was change the class words to "digital" and the blockers don't block it. (I also tried the word "banner" instead, but they still got blocked.)

Figured I'd share this here in case it helps anyone out.

Daniel · February 16, 2021, 10:27pm

Thanks for sharing. You can see other blocked DIV classes and IDs here:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/spyesx/42fe84c0ef757d1c38a4

adblock-blacklist.css

.sidebar_newsletter_sign_up,
.sidebar_subscribe,
.sign-up-form-single,
.signup-form--header,
.signup-with-checkboxes,
.skinny-sign-up,
.slidedown-newsletter,
.small-newsletter,
.social-link-mail,
.social_newsletter_box,

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These are pulled in from lists like the ones that ad blockers like UBlock uses: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/de1ed2c519a9987411199db831fdd0ce38fd48c1/assets/assets.json#L109

CheeseDeluxe · February 16, 2021, 11:16pm

Great link, I had no idea. I always figured they were more sophisticated than scraping classes.