The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

For a year or two now blocking ads with software like AdBlock / Ghostery has grown to be popular. We understand perfectly that some of you might find ads annoying. The effect on Guru3D.com due to this has become very negative. Each year we publish many articles, content, benchmarks and test results. You can read that content for free, you do not have to pay for this content neither do we want you to.

Websites like Guru3D.com rely heavily on ad-revenue, we these days (any website really) need huge visitor/traffic numbers to remain break even in today's advertising market. From that ad-revenue we pay the bills for staff, work-space, inventory, electricity, test equipment, our five servers that need constant updating, the rack space and the hosting bandwidth in the co-location data-center and other costs.

Guru3D.com is a costly operation. The good news, we are doing well in terms of visitors and the number of people that like to read our website content. Despite a complex  PC market, the interest of the reader base is very solid and consistent.  We measure data-traffic in relation to visitors in two ways, internally our CMS measures how often articles are read. Externally Google analytics and DFP keep track of things. Ever since the past year or so the numbers do not match anymore, and that is the bad news.

Example: last year in (October 2014) we had nearly 4.5 million hits (read) on our articles. This year (October 2015) we are at 4.4 million hits,  while the month has not ended yet. So in terms of traffic things remain the same.

There is however a huge discrepancy in Google analytics / DFP. Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day. That's right, nearly 50% of the readers are blocking ads.

After some further investigation, the direct effect of the on-going trend of ad-blockers is resulting into halving our revenues / registered pageviews.  Over the past year we have seen our income literally halfed as a direct result of active ad-blocking. Everybody can understand that long term this is not sustainable anymore, right now ad-blockers are a true danger for our existence.

Our pledge: we do not serve intrusive ads like pop-downs/pop-ups and takeovers. We serve common ads, mostly targeted and matched at your interests and PC gaming / hardware.

Please whitelist Guru3D.com in Adblock Plus

• Go to www.Guru3D.com
• Click on the AdBlock Plus icon in your browser
• Click on "Enabled for this site" to switch Adblock Plus towards "Disabled for this site"

Our friendly request: Please, seriously please start white-listing the Guru3D.com domain in your ad-blockers as slowly but steadily the effect of ad-blocking is choking and killing us. If you like to read Guru3D.com now and in the future, please give this serious request consideration.

Thank you very much for understanding.

Hilbert Hagedoorn

Editor, owner & PC hardware aficionado -- Guru3D.com

Using an AdBlocker? But absolutely unequivocally refuse to disable it ? In that case please consider a month donation to compensate and support Guru3D.com that way e.g. 50 cents / 1 buck a month (whatever you are comfortable with).