Bad News for Dot Com Moguls: Ad Blocking
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 12 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: General
I remember back when VCR’s were common, a device could be purchased for it that would prevent commercials from being recorded to your tape. It operated on the principle that commercial advertising was louder than the program you were recording. When the volume increased, the VCR stopped recording until the volume went back to normal. This was a great investment for those who were tired of viewing endless advertising throughout their favourite programs.
Many people today are equally sick of seeing so many ads on web sites. The worst ads are the ones that cover your screen and don’t go away until you close it or it closes by itself after a certain time. For my web sites, I would never use ads that cover content. All of the advertising is around the content and can be easily ignored. I don’t ask people to support my sites by clicking on ads and/or making purchases through the ads, but its appreciated if they do. 
Blocking Ads With A Free Firefox Plugin
Recently, a plugin for Firefox called Adblock Plus has received quite a bit of attention. This application terrifies people who fill their web sites with advertising. Adblock Plus prevents advertising from appearing when you view a web page. You right click on the ad you don’t like and then choose Adblock from the context menu. The ad won’t appear again on the page. Like spam filters for e-mail, it doesn’t block everything but it does block most ads.
Web site owners with advertising aren’t pleased with Adblock Plus. Firefox users with this plugin are accused as being thieves. They are said to be robbing potential sales from the web advertising. I don’t agree with this line of thinking. One of the selling points of the Internet is the great freedom that it gives to everyone. People should be free to view ads or block them.
Web Site Owners Strike Back
Some web owners don’t see things this way and choose to block all Firefox users from their sites. I don’t think this will convince anyone to stop blocking ads or even continuing to use their web site. The Internet gives you a great variety of choices and there are always other similar web sites to go to.
These angry web site owners recommend people to stop using Firefox and start using Internet Explorer, Opera, or Safari. Its only a matter of time before easy to use ad blocking plugins are made for these browsers. If your a more advanced user, you can use the Hosts file to block unwanted ads that works with any web browser.
The Solution
There is nothing wrong with blocking ads from web sites. What is wrong are web site owners attacking their users and potential customers. An important thing to remember is that if you want to convince someone to accept your viewpoint, you have to change how they feel about it. Explain to your users why the advertising is there and perhaps they won’t block it.
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2 Comments »
on 15 Sep 2007 at 12:21 am 1.Grandt said …
It’s not just the ones that cover the content that are annoying, it’s also the visually “loud” ones, with frantic blinking (“You Won” or “you are the 1Einf’th visitor” type ads). Even worse are the flash ads with sound turned ON by default, really not funny when you open lots of tabs in Firefox.
The last type I really hate is the badly written ones, flash or Java ads that use 20-50% of my CPU, grinding my browser to a halt.
To be honest, the only ads I don’t block at the moment, are Googles. Mmainly because they don’t annoy me, and because they are light weight, and the page loads even if the ad server can’t be reached. Adtech and the others usually halts the page load when their servers are out of reach, delaying access to the the content you actually came for.
on 21 Sep 2007 at 9:48 am 2.Johan Cyprich said …
The flash ads which are games are equally annoying, i.e. hit the monkey to win a prize. The best ads blend in with the page content and they tend to be clicked on more because they don’t look like ads. Google Adsense is a good example of this.