Firefox and AdBlock
As the Firefox browser gains acceptance among Internet surfers, it also gets the attention of more developers. One such developer came up with a plug-in called AdBlock. This plug-in lets the user block certain elements on a website, like images, scripts and Google ads. What does this mean to site owners who have an income or even make a living off advertising? I think it’s too early to tell but this has the potential to be devastating. After it’s installed, the user can simply right click an object, be it an image, banner or Google ad, for example, and tell AdBlock to block it. Just like that it’s gone from sight. This can be nice for users and very bad for site owners and advertisers.
The big question is “How likely are surfers to block many images and advertisements?” Since the browser already blocks pop-ups, do you think most surfers find advertising so annoying that they will keep blocking ads on sites they visit often? Possibly a bigger threat is the availability of text lists that users can easily download and merely import into this plug-in. These lists make it easy for the user to block a large host of images and ads without doing much work. Looking at some of these lists is enough to make publishers and advertisers alike rather nervous. Anyone can create a list and post it to their website so their “preferences” now become someone else’s “preferences”. If you thought it was bad dealing with Norton and their list of sites to block, wait until every 15 year old with too much time on their hands creates a list, searches for more lists online and adds their sites to their list and someone takes his list and adds it to their own and so on. This behavior is present today.
Some lists I viewed were intended to block such files and even words (used in URLs, directories, names) like sales, user, affiliate, amazon, barnsandnoble, banner, promo, commission-junction.com, kanoodle.com, shareasale.com, linkshare, qksrv, linksynergy, feeds.feedburner.com, x10.com and hundreds more. It’s easy to see how harmful this can get. Likely, some of these lists are created and offered by people with a grudge against a certain site or even term. And, most of those who download these lists to import into AdBlock are surely not viewing the hundreds of terms to see if one should be removed. One such list provider even had Google ads on their site and tells the visitor to “..deal with it!”.
At this time, I’m not sure what, if anything, can be done about this. Can a page detect if AdBlock is being used and not display the page at all but only deliver up a notice stating access has been blocked because the visitor is using AdBlock? Is that overkill? Time will tell.
