Blocking Ad-Blockers
Well, there’s a little tizzy going on over the Adblock Plus Firefox extension. The latest one I saw was this CNET piece on some dude who’s now calling for a boycott of Firefox - not a don’t download it boycott, mind you, but a don’t let your website display on Firefox boycott. Which is, I believe, really crazy, although I can understand where he’s coming from.
So Adblock Plus prevents all sorts of ads from showing up - this in turns upsets publishers because most of the web is run on advertising money. That is, much of the content on the web is “free” because the content or service providers are bringing in ad revenue - everytime an ad is viewed or clicked they get a little cold, hard cash. So a pervasive ad blocker has sort of big repercussions on the web as we know it.
The CNET piece makes the point that it is somewhat like DVR’s skipping commercials. ReplayTV preceeded Tivo and used to let you skip commercials entirely - they didn’t last long as the networks felt pretty strongly that they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. TiVo more network friendlily (is that a word?? it is a word!) just lets you fast forward through them. They then go on to say that because TV networks have fixed costs and web costs go up as traffic goes up, it’s actually worse to block web ads than skip tv commercials. They go a little overboard and claim that blocking web ads is pretty close to theft (versus just freeloading).
There’s a couple differences, beyond that. A lot of it, in my mind, is in adoption. The DVR is a set top box that everyone has - you can get them from your cable company, etc.. it is easy to use and everyone intuitively understands how to press the button to fast forward. So it’s a really scary proposition for the networks - if allowed to take off, everyone could easily start watching their shows 8 minutes later (or whenever) and skip all the commercials. And by everyone, I mean everyone with a DVR which could in a short period of time be anyone with a cable box. Commercials are way more intrusive than web ads, as well - it’s nearly 1/3 of the time spent watching any given show so there’s a time incentive as well to skip them. People have stuff to do, more shows to watch and commercials suck up a lot of that time.
A Firefox extension on the other hand is something that at this point, very few people are going to install. The percentage of people who will download a different browser than the one that comes with their computer is reasonably small. And the percentage of those people who are going to find out about an extension and then install it is a fraction of that already small group. So the audience is already quite small. Beyond that, ads are annoying, some more than others, but they are for the most part unintrusive. People have learned to be banner blind - most people don’t even see most of the ads on a site. And claims that “they slow down your browsing experience” are pretty overblown. Sure some crazy ads can slow down a site, but as broadband is increasingly the order of the day, this really isn’t an issue. So I think that of that small set of people who are Firefox extension downloaders, even fewer actually care enough to go and get Adblock Plus.
In the end, I think that overall Adblock Plus is probably a bad idea (not that people shouldn’t use it if they really hate them ads, you need to do what you need to do). If successful and online ad revenue dries up something kinda drastic (and probably bad) will happen to the web. Plus with all them google contextual ads, I have, on occasion found an ad that I genuinely was glad to have found. Most likely, though, I doubt it will make any big impact on the world and calls to prevent Firefox users from viewing websites is a crazy, crazy reaction to the extension.
September 12th, 2007 at 10:50 am
i use adblock (not plus) in firefox constantly. firefox is my primary browser and adblock is always on. You fail to mention the main reason i use it. I do most of my surfing on a 1Ghz G4 Powerbook. You would be amazed at the processor cycles that a few open tabs containing bad flash ads take up.
Not only that, but while i agree it may not impact download times significantly on my roadrunner connection, it does when im on my evdo card.
i say; if you want to be fair to those making money off ads by limiting ad blockers, there need also be a way to limit the number, size and intrusiveness of those ads to be fair to the viewer.
September 12th, 2007 at 11:12 am
You’re right - I think there’s definitely cases that make sense - primarily with non-broadband sites. As broadband becomes more and more prevalent sites have been blowing up in size, so it’s definitely a bonus for slower connections to drop them ads.
And also for people on their lameass G4 notebooks. Yeah, those people, too. :)
But again, there’s always reasons for some people to use them, but I don’t think that will really reach a point where it has a financial impact.
On the other hand, if Firefox ever decided to include such a thing and turn it on by default, that would be a whole other issue.
September 12th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
I refuse to surf without Firefox and AdBlock Plus. I didn’t mind ads when it was just a banner at the top or bottom of the page. But, anymore, it’s everywhere on the page and it’s all flash, often times with sound. Once I started blocking for that, I realized how irritating it is to constantly be advertised to. It’s really a beautiful thing to surf without being screamed at to buy this or that all the time.
Content providers can cry me a river about allegedly lost revenue. All the sites threatening to do this block (good luck with that, BTW) aren’t sites I’d go to anyway. There’s already a Firefox extension that will tell the server you’re using whatever browser you want to tell them, or none at all.
September 12th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Heh! I agree with you that threatening to block Firefox is just about the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard about this. It would certainly be difficult to come up with ways to actually block a firefox user who wanted to see your site - although that CNet piece talks about other ways people have figured it out.
Ultimately, like I said, it’s never going to have a material affect on anyone’s finances since adoption is always going to remain low. But if something major happened that made it be the default of the bulk of Firefox users (like they rolled out an update with adblocking on as a default) - I think that would be a real problem for the web as it works now.
And that flash that plays sound automatically kills me. I think I saw a firefox extension out there to prevent autoplay - even for regular embedded media. I should find that…
September 12th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Cpt. Wrong makes a good point with the comment about realizing how irritating sound can be which brings me to another idea we should question. Your idea that “People have learned to be banner blind” sounds to me like we are letting them lower the bar on us. I dont like the idea of just getting used to irritating or intrusive behavior as a solution. Until ad-blocking, that was all we could do if we wanted to get at the content.
Anyway, we all know firefox would never ship with something like that turned on. it will be interesting to see if this ever grows to more than the occasional grumble.
September 12th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Well, I don’t think people are lowering the bar. I think that it is, to a large degree, the price that people pay to get all the content and services that are on the web now. Every social network is nearly 100% if not 100% ad driven. If no more ads? No more social networks. Every magazine on the net? Ad driven, it drives subscriptions, too, but ad money is a good portion of income from the web. Services like gmail? Ad driven. The web2.0 boom? Ad driven.
So if everyone had ad blocking turned on, those would all go away. Who knows, that might be an interesting return back to ‘94, but the web as it runs now wouldn’t really be there anymore. But, since I don’t think it is even within the realm of conception at this point that any non-trivial portion of the internet users is going to use ad blocking, people’s reactions against the extension are overblown and crazy.
September 12th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
There is no way I can deal with a lot of sites that offer these annoying Flash ads, or the animation ones. I use Adblock Plus for the really annoying ones like the intellitext ones and others. Most times, I don’t block ads that are static ones, just the ones that do a lot of animation and moving and won’t stop.
September 13th, 2007 at 6:57 am
May, that’s a good point. Pervasive selective use of an AdBlocker could punish those really annoying ads while leaving less annoying or more useful ads to continue to appear. It’d be the darwin of ads! (since right now, unfortunately, the more annoying the ad, the more successful it is likely to be).
September 13th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Why not have the adblock extension alter the browser’s USER_AGENT to alert the site that the user is blocking either a certain class of ads (e.g., >35k, Flash, etc.)? That lets the site know what kind of ads piss people off, and lets them calm their advertisers’ fears about ad blocking — or, conversely, lets them help their advertisers create ad banners that are find a more receptive audience.
It would also give the site the right to block out users who completely refuse ads, but isn’t that the nature of a free society? You have the right to refuse to receive the ads that go with my content, and I have the right to then not show you my content.
September 13th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
that’s an interesting idea. I think that one issue will be the granularity of this - it isn’t necessarily size or type, but rather obnoxiousness of the ad that is one major problem. So, I don’t mind flash ads, but ads that start playing sound or roll out to cover the whole screen or whatever - or flash epileptic fit inducing lights at me… It’d be great to have some means of automatically reporting which ads specifically bother me and that I’m not viewing. But, that’s probably too much for anyone to deal with. Sigh.
At any rate, it’s a good idea in theory, I’d like to see how it’d work in practice.
September 13th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
There are already examples of scalable, robust systems that let browsers and web servers negotiate automatically — p3p, for example. I think if there’s a serious market out there for people who want to pick and choose which ads they want to see, there is absolutely a technology that will let rational solutions form.
It’s arguable that most people won’t ever even take advantage of this, but then again, pop-up blockers became universal; this idea is just the logical extension of those.
September 13th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
One more point — such a system would obviously require some kind of introspection into the various multimedia ad formats.
Actually, Adobe could just build this concept into the Flash player — a preference setting that disables certain animation techniques, for which the Flash animation could provide alternate creative.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Interesting, although a more complex system does end up requiring more on the content providers end - which the ol’ user agent trick, kinda didn’t.
I think that ad-blockers are less of a draw than popup blockers - those things actively made surfing almost impossible at times. For the most part on most sites, ads are relatively unobtrusive (compared to a world full of popups).
But I’d love to see something like that happen. Man, I’d love it. I’d pay more attention to ads, since I’d be actively trying to send advertisers a message about which ads I hated. :)