After my last blog post arguing that advertisers should fall on a well and die, I've given the issue some more thought. After all, how would this little blog survive without ads? How would I keep up my product reviews without advertisers sending them to me for free?

Therefore, I came up with a plan to save the advertising industry from the scourge known as "ad-blockers". It's not precisely cheap, but we can still make it work in volume.

First of all, the Central Bureau of Advertising (or similar agency) has to announce publicly that they intend to make a raffle. The prizes have to be pretty good - The main prize should be at least a car, and the minor prizes should be iPhones (or even better, access to a yet-unreleased version), tablets, smartwatches and the like. You'll need a lot of them, so this is the expensive part. Ad agencies have to create quite a buzz, but then again, that's what they do for a living anyway.

Once we've assembled what is essentially the coolest contest on Earth, we announce the rules. In a nutshell, they will be:

1. Everyone is allowed to claim a prize
2. Winners will be selected via ads, served through the usual channels.
3. Other than reading "you've won", there's no requirement about what the ads will look like
4. The campaign will go on as long as there are prizes left. New prizes can be added at any moment

Here's the genius part: the winning ads will look as sketchy as possible. I suggest flashing gifs straight out of the 90s. Think about it: if the buzz for the campaign is high enough, we won't just have thousands (millions?) of users disabling their ad-blockers; we'll have effectively trained them to click on anything, no matter how suspicious it looks! All you need is to drag the contest long enough for little Johnny to think "I wish I could disable the ads, but then I might miss my chance to win". Once smaller companies start running their own contests in the same way, it's game over for ad-blockers.

There are of course some details to sort out, but I think you get the main idea. Some people will argue that this is dishonest, and that will lead to thousands of virus infections from rogue ads. Don't listen to these people: it's not your problem if some schmuck fails to protect his/her computer, and then again, if you cared about "dishonesty" your industry wouldn't be in this problem anyway.

I'm confident you'll find my scheme worth trying, and I hope this will clear any remaining bad blood between us. No need to thank me.