Well, it’s clear that the ads are the biggest revenue sources for most of the websites that offer services for free. And indeed, are essential for these websites to continue providing their services, and eventually, grow. As a bootstrapped publishing business ourselves, the discussion around ad blocking has been a touchy subject. But, at TechPP, we haven’t shied away from writing about the subject as our core mission is to empower our readers to make an informed decision.
While, as a publication, we believe in the advertising model, there are some websites that blatantly deliver content blocking ads and make it so intrusive to the point that it becomes difficult for visitors to go around and use the website. As if that’s not enough, some websites block your access to their service, if they find out that you are using some kind of ad-blocking service to get around or bypass the ads on their websites. In case you find yourself in such a situation, here are some tricks that you can use to get around the situation.
Going Incognito
Almost every other browser these days provide an ‘incognito’ or ‘private’ mode that does not store your data like the browsing history and cookies. Using the mode to access a website, with an ad-blocker enabled, can eventually get you through the ad-block detection on many websites. However, to allow your ad-blocker extension to work in an incognito window, you need to go into your ad blocker settings and enable the incognito option in the extension settings. Among the different web browsers available, this method works best with the Firefox web browser and hardly ever on Google Chrome.
Disabling JavaScript
To disable JavaScript, you need to visit your website address and hit the padlock icon, on the top-left side, and select the ‘Site settings’ option from the drop-down menu. After this, you will be redirected to a new tab. Here, you need to scroll down until you find ‘JavaScript’ and click the drop-down option next to it. From the options listed, choose ‘Block’, and reload the page again.
A thing to note with this method is that by disabling JavaScript, you are essentially disabling all the elements that use JavaScript. As a result, a lot of the elements may not appear or function properly. So, if you are up for just reading some stuff on the website, you are pretty good to go with this method.
Accessing Cached Website
A lot of the times, the incognito or private mode might not work properly, so as another alternative, you can try using the cached version of a website to get around the ad-block detection. For this, you need to enter the exact URL in Google search and from the list of results that appears, click on the downward-facing arrow (next to the ideal result), and select ‘cached’. Once done, you will be presented with a cached version of the website that you requested. A cached version is basically a snapshot of a website at a particular instant of time. So, a lot of the things might get updated over the period you spend on the website.
Reading Mode
Apple was amongst the first ones to introduce the Reading Mode on Safari, for both Desktop and Mobile versions. This basically gets rid of the javascripts and present a neat UI with a focus on content (text, images and videos). In case your favorite web browsers don’t have Reading Mode pre-installed, you can install third-party browser extensions like Just Read for Chrome or this one for Opera.
Using Userscripts
If you don’t want to go through all the trial and error process to find out what works well for you and instead want a more effective way to get around ad-block detection, you can do so by installing a userscript manager. For those unaware, a userscript manager is a kind of browser extension that provides a user interface for users to manage userscripts – a program written in JavaScript that allows web page modifications. If you are a Chrome or Opera browser user, you can install Tampermonkey, whereas if you are a Firefox user, you can install Greasemonkey. After it’s installed, you need to visit the filter list and fill out the necessary details and restart your browser.
That’s it. Now every time you visit a website that tries to detect your ad-blocking service, the extension will automatically bypass it, without having you to perform any operation. Not to mention, the obvious solution to get around ad-block detection, which is whitelisting a website, involves removing a single webpage or all web pages of a website from the ad-block service. Considering you use the internet to access information from various sources all the time, there might be some websites whose content you like the most or visit frequently. For such websites, you can always opt for the whitelisting option to show your support, and in-turn bypass the ad-block detection. To do this, you need to click on the ad-block extension icon on the browser and disable it on the pages with this domain.
To conclude, all that we need you to know is that ads are the primary source of revenue for many websites you see on the Internet today. With that said, taking into consideration the users’ perspective, it can sometimes be agonizing to see your browser bombarded with ads throughout the time you spend on it. But, instead of using the services mentioned above blatantly and blocking ads across all the websites, you might need to reconsider if the ads are really obtrusive and come in your way of browsing to an extent that makes it unusable. In case they do, you can surely go ahead and block ads on their websites. However, if they don’t, you can actually support the creator and whitelist that website.
