Touching on some of the points I made in Blocking Ads and Stealing Commissions With FireFox, Chris Beasley’s article Why I Love Interstitials caught my eye. Chris says he’s so enamored because he sees interstitials as “more or less the only ad format that can easily and reliably foil every ad blocker.”

As he explains,

“Interstitials are full page ads that load between page views on your site. Most interstitials display for 10 seconds or so before forwarding the user onto the page they were trying to view, and almost all interstitials include a skip button if the user does not want to wait.”

Like me, Chris feels that rampant ad blocking threatens the future of content-based websites. He goes on to say,

“If you do not like the ads on a site, and you know that the site is ad supported, ethically you shouldn’t use the site if you have ad blocking installed.”

It’s a contentious view that many people think is ridiculous, but if you’ve read my previous posts on the subject, you’ll know I’m not one of them.

In putting his case as to why he feels interstitials are the answer to ad blocking, Chris says:

“The reason is that interstitials load in the same browser window as your site, and they load on a different server from your site. If you know which pages on your site are to serve interstitials, you can detect, using the HTTP_REFERER variable, whether or not your visitors actually viewed the ad or not. If they did not, then you know they are blocking ads, and you can automatically forward them to a page explaining how your site is ad supported and how they need to turn their software off. You could accomplish this same thing with cookies. Getting around this type of setup would be difficult to impossible for ad blockers. They’d need to generate fake cookies or referrers and then you’d need to make just a minor change and it wouldn’t work until they managed to do an update.”

Personally I’m not sure interstitials are the way forward. Not yet at any rate.

It’s true they might be good for defeating the ad blockers. However, unless they are kept very low-bandwidth to ensure they load fast for everyone — a tough job with so many surfers still using slow dialup connections — many people will find them extremely annoying.

An interstitial physically blocks your progress between pages until the skip button loads so you can dismiss the ad. And as we all know, even waiting for a few seconds can soon become extremely irritating if it happens regularly.