I noticed something strange when visiting InfinityFree websites using the Brave browser.When Brave Shields is enabled (which is the default), most of the advertisements on InfinityFree websites don’t seem to load at all. Basically, the site works normally, but the ads are completely missing.I also tested this myself. If I turn Shields off, the InfinityFree website can detect the ad blocker and shows the usual warning. However, if someone visits the website for the first time with Brave Shields enabled, there doesn’t seem to be any warning, because the ads are simply blocked by Brave before the site can detect them.This made me wonder: if a significant number of visitors use Brave with Shields enabled, does InfinityFree still get any ad revenue from those visitors?.Has InfinityFree considered this issue, or is there any planned solution for detecting Brave Shields more reliably? I’m curious how the current ad system handles this situation.
I doubt this will ever be the case to be honest, but yes if most of the people are using very strong techniques to block the ads InfinityFree will generate far less revenue.
Does using Brave Shields affect ad revenue
Brave Shields is an ad blocker. If you use Brave Shields, ads will be blocked in your browser.
InfinityFree makes money from ads. Brave Shields block ads. Therefore, using Brave Shields means InfinityFree cannot make money from ads.
No surprise here.
Why don’t you see a warning
We have an ad block recovery system in place, which is intended to detect ad blockers and either try to circumvent it and show ads anyway or block you from accessing the website.
However, this doesn’t work with all ad blockers, especially browser extensions. Developers of ad block extensions do not want their users to be blocked from accessing website, and can inject code into websites that actively blocks ad block recovery system. Which is probably why you get no ads and no warning.
What are we doing about this
Honestly, it’s a tough nut to crack. I don’t particularly like ads either, but nobody has really come up with a better way to provide something for free online but also make some money off of it. So ads are the way to go. We do get some affiliate revenue from iFastNet and Site.Pro, but that’s not a lot compared to revenue of programmatic ads.
As a hosting provider, our audience is quite tech savvy meaning ad block usage will be higher than average, and it does undercut our revenue.
Just detecting ad blockers is a lot easier said than done. Ad blockers don’t want to be detected and definitely don’t want to be blocked. I’ve seen changes being pushed to popular ad blockers within days after me making a change to combat them. So detecting Brave Shields is not something I can “just do”, tick off and move on. It’s a constant arms race, and one I know I cannot win.
But InfinityFree is financially healthy so this is not an urgent issue to address. If it does become more pressing, we need to find solutions, which could mean stepping up our ad block detection, or finding alternative sources of revenue.
The other thing to note is that while a lot of us don’t like ad’s there are quite a few of us (myself incluided) will white list free sites that we like so we can continue to support them