I use Firefox exclusively.One of Firefox's most popular extensions is AdBlock plus. AdBlock plus, by default, blocks Google ads. That means that webmasters like myself, who allow text ads on their site (including Google AdSense) are now seeing their revenue drop.
On the positive side, web surfing is faster and less cluttered by advertisements, particularly those windows which crawl across the page that I'm trying to view (my personal anti-favorite).
Firefox is growing at a rate that is probably keeping Steve Ballmer awake at night. And nobody is more pleased than I. IE's liberties in ignoring www standards made it a very bastardized web surfing experience. FF has forced MS's IE developers to add FF's popular features, and also to at least start acknowledging that there are indeed standards out there.
So, in my eyes, reduced AdSense revenue is part of the price to be paid for getting Goliath's attention, and forcing him to change his behavior.
It's just a shame that the AdBlock developers found it necessary to throw Google into the same pot as DoubleClick, Commission Junction, and the other problem children.
I guess it's just part of the overall tarnishing of the shine that Google enjoyed in the eyes of all a couple of years ago. They are now the big dog on the web, and subject to attack by those who don't like big dogs.
Personally speaking, I have never had a problem with the way Google did or does business. Take GMail, for example.
When Google launched GMail, there was a mad rush to gain then-rare invites. Google's gigabyte of space blew away the five or ten megs offered by other freebie email accounts. The interface was (and still is) quick, intuitive, and practically ad-free. The ads that do appear are textual.
However, privacy advocates squawked about the fact that your mail was subject to keyword scanning by the big G, so that contextual ads could be served up.
First of all, if you're concerned about email privacy, you'd better be encrypting it via PGP. Otherwise, it can be read in a bewildering number of ways.
Second, GMail is a free email service. The whiners remind me of someone I know who is constantly seeking out freebies, then complaining about them afterwards.
GMail allows you to use POP3 clients to download your email directly to Thunderbird or any other email reader. Sophisticated forwarding and account consolidation is also offered. I personally have three GMail accounts which all feed into the same mailbox. GMail's spam filter is simply amazing. I would guess that it's 99.99% accurate. And you can set up a vacation auto-responder quickly.
That's a tremendous amount of bang for no bucks. And yet, it still has its detractors.
I have seen occasions where AdSense slows the loading of a page to the point that it's just noticeable. But that's exceptional. Normally, the ads are there as fast as the rest of the page (which, if designed badly, can take a while itself).
If I ran the AdBlock Plus development team, would I block AdSense? No. But I have no say in such matters, so I'll just grin and bear the slowdown in revenue (which just barely pays the bills as it is).
On the other hand, some webmasters have declared war. Check out this example.
Yeesh. Reminds me of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi.
So where is the middle ground? On the one hand, I feel for surfers who have been alienated by those who have used AdSense in an obtrusive manner. On the other hand, I know what it's like to see revenues drop.
Here's my hope: That AdBlock Plus will eventually add a per-site policy that a user can easily set. That will allow those of us who design nicely (I hope I'm considered in that group) to respectfully request that ad blocking be turned off, and surfers who understand all that is involved to do so.
Comments (1)
I realize this is an old post but since I just stumbled upon it via a Google search, others may too.
From the post:
Although figuring out how to do it may not be easy, the actual process is. Go to your Adblock Plus preferences and create a new filter (Filters->Add filter). Any filter beginning with "@@" (without the quotes) works in reverse: it exempts matching sites from ad blocking. For example, this filter creates an exemption for this site, allowing ads to load:
Posted by Me | July 20, 2010 11:29 AM
Posted on July 20, 2010 11:29