Why you should be concerned:
Norton has taken a perfectly good suite of functions and destroyed it by activating their ad blocking function as the default setting. This can affect both your website's appearance and your income since it intentionally
blocks your affiliate ads from being displayed. A visitor to your site that is infected with this software sees gaping holes in your pages, holes that mean no possibility of income from your efforts.
We believe most people are not offended by the presence of ads on websites and recognize the need for websites to be supported by affiliate ads. Symantec apparently disagrees and has taken the ultimate step of arrogance in deciding
that their users will not see your ads without taking the active step of overriding the setting.
Enough anecdotal evidence has been put forth to indicate many people don't know this function has been set and are confused by the empty space on web sites or the complete lack of expected links for products they wish to purchase.
What can be done:
To prevent Symantec Corporation from obstructing our rights to display ads on our own sites, we have begun using a simple but effective method of insuring that visitors will see all the material we present.
Our simple trick displays the ads as intended and prevents Norton from interfering with them by presenting them as background images within a table cell. As an added feature, we have set this up on our site so when Norton
blocks our intended ads, a visitor will see ads for their competitor, McAfee VirusScan. We have joined McAfee's affiliate program as a direct result of Symantec's hostile move.
We offer the following partial screen shots of a test page as normally displayed (top) and as displayed when interfered with by Norton (bottom.) The "If you can read this..." text is actually a jpg file. Without taking these steps, a visitor using Norton would see nothing where the
three banner ads are.
We offer the following simple method for countering this offensive act by Symantec:
5 easy steps:
- copy a banner and host it from your server.
- create a table with a cell using the saved image as the background image
- set the cell size to the size of the background image
- use the 'on click' function to direct clicks somewhere
- place your intended ad link in the cell
Right click here to download the sample code in a text file.
We hate having to take these step. It not only is a time-consuming and completely unnecessary exercise, but we regret losing Norton as a product we have used and trusted for years to provide protection for our computers.
It is sad to see a product we've trusted suddenly become an enemy of websites everywhere.