The problem is, the people that would know about your ad-free service would be the same people that know about Adblock Plus, so it would be a hard sell. Perhaps if you marketed it to older generations with no technical experience it might work out, but they would probably want to buy the software from a store.
You'd be surprised how many people don't know ad-block exists. I'm not just talking about my 65 year old uncle, John, either. I can only speak from first hand experience, but a majority of my 20-something year old friends are in the dark too.
Only 1% of US internet-goers have it installed. The hard part will be educating the other 99%.
Isn't there any way around adblock? Maybe you can't stop adblock from blocking your ads, but can't you make it impossible for adblock to distinguish between ads and content?
I'm not an expert on how adblock works, but I thought it just blocked stuff coming in from certain domains.
The thing about Ad-Block is that is does have the problem with differentiating between content and ad's from time to time. One example is when trying to watch a video on Yahoo or Hulu. Ad-Block does not have the ability to disable those type of ad's and for the most part those are the type of advertisements the general community would want to eliminate. I myself use Ad-Block and the biggest benefit I see from it is blocking the ad's on YouTube videos that everyone seems to hate. With that said I also disable for certain sites because I see the power in having tailored advertisements i.e. Facebook so for them I leave it disabled. Selling it as a service would be difficult because for the most part people would only pay if it was a big inconvenience and for most people it's not. The fact that their is at least a marginal benefit for the ad's they see also makes it much more difficult.
Good question, what were some of the keywords for your promotion? Did you target accordingly? I'd think that simply putting up an ad on Google with the default network settings resulted in low CTR because the people who would have seen this are already using other methods.
