We’ve had Adblock installed on Firefox for quite a while, and it is true: all advertising is gone. If everyone used Firefox and Adblock, B12’s webzine would no longer be self-sufficient because that 56¢ a day in google ad revenue would dry up, but the really hard-hit will be Google’s main sources of income - highly trafficked sites like the New York Times, and ultimately, Google itself. That said, I’m not about to uninstall Adblock anytime soon (though I use Safari 60% of the time, and Firefox only 40% of the time).
Noam Cohen writes:
Whiting Out the Ads, but at What Cost? - New York Times:
What happens when the advertisements are wiped clean from a Web site? There is a contented feeling similar to what happens when you watch a recorded half-hour network TV show on DVD in 22 minutes, or when a blizzard hits Times Square and for a few hours, the streets are quiet and unhurried, until the plows come to clear away all that white space.
But when a blizzard hits Times Square, the news reports will focus on the millions of dollars of business lost, not the cross-country skiing opportunities gained.
Likewise, in the larger scheme of things, Adblock Plus — while still a niche product for a niche browser — is potentially a huge development in the online world, and not because it simplifies Web sites cluttered with advertisements.
The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered.
From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter.
For now, however, the big players have decided to ignore the phenomenon. Neither Google nor CNN.com, for example, would comment on ad-blocking programs, which can also be added to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. (The Internet Explorer add-ons are not necessarily free and do not necessarily work as seamlessly as Adblock Plus working with the open-source Firefox browser.)
Technorati Tags: advertising, google, freeware, software
