aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, September 03, 2007

Ad blockers, advertisers and us

We’re not captive audiences any more and advertisers have to learn to treat us that way. Once they do, not that many of us will bother with ad blocker software:

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.

The consumer/advertiser relationship is a symbiotic one, thrown out of balance because ad-people have gone too far and we the people now have the tools to push back. I have no doubt that symbiosis will be restored.

Case in point:

Wladimir Palant, developer of the open-source Adblock Plus project...[and] a 27-year-old programmer in Cologne, Germany, is not an ideological opponent of online advertising. For example, he counts himself a fan of the ads that show up with a Google search, saying they are useful and unobtrusive. That does not mean Adblock will not block Google’s ads, however. It means Mr. Palant has to customize his own version of the program to allow them in.

We want ads. Ad people have to switch from forcing them down our throats to giving us the ads we want, when we want them.

Here, on the other hand, is precisely how not to do it:

For now, the opposition to Adblock Plus has been led by small Web sites who want all Firefox users blocked from Internet sites in retaliation. One such advocacy site, whyfirefoxisblocked.com, taunts a Firefox user with the headline, “You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks the Firefox browser.”

The page includes the following argument: “While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Adblock Plus’s unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking Firefox is the only alternative.”

Mr. Palant responds to that kind of thinking here:

...this guy thinks that he as the website owner has every right in the world and the visitors that pay him indirectly don’t have any rights at all. He would probably prefer if ad blockers were forbidden by law. And the hosts file. And the remote control because it allows you to zap away to another TV channel when the advertisements come. Actually, I don’t think you have the right to turn away from your TV when the advertisements come - you watched the show so now you have to pay.