You're still susceptible to ad-blocking if you serve an plain image ad from your own domain though, which sucks for those of us who do it. If there is a way to alert users that you vet, self-serve, and don't use animated ads, I'd love to know about it :)
Uhm, I use uBlock Origin and when going to the site in your profile I don't see any image blocking (just google analytics and social media plugins). The ads in the sidebar (id="ws_widget__ad_codes-3"?) display just fine, and I would say that your site is the perfect example of how ads should be: highly relevant, static, well designed, correctly integrated in the look and feel of the page...
The last time I checked with Adblock or Adblock plus (I don't remember which) I seem to remember it filtering out commonly used indicators of ads like divs with ad-related names or filenames containing _300x250_ etc... I could be mistaken though.
Thanks for the kind words too, I've really tried to make the site a place that I would personally like to browse and am glad to hear other people feel the advertising is nicely done.
I happen to disagree with that method of blocking ads because of false negatives and false positives; isn't the solution simply to remove the offending patterns from your filenames?
I'll add to the praise for your site. Your ads remind me somewhat of those from The Deck [1], although yours are nicer because they're 1st-party. Are you able to share any info. about the model? Do advertisers pay per click or per impression? If the latter, how do you prove your traffic figures to them, or have you built up a suitable level of trust?
Yeah, filename changing is what I would end up doing.
As far as the model is concerned, a lot of the industry is familiar with magazine advertising so I just go with a monthly rate to keep things simple. There is trust involved, though most run a trial before committing to anything longer-term so they are able to see if the level of generated activity meets their expectations.
It is much easier to do this kind of advertising because the content itself is so narrow that the readership ends up being narrow, whereas a general site like BBC or CNN you end up having a wide audience and then end up needing tracking tools to help narrow the audience into smaller groups.
Ads are usually filtered by the serving URL, so ads such as yours shouldn't be blocked. I just tested the site in your profile as well, and the ads were there, even with uBlock enabled. There weren't any visual differences loading the page with/without it.
