I'm brand new to this software. I'm wondering, for all the web sites that depend on ads as their main source of income, will widespread use of adblock plus put them out of business?
I could be wrong, but it seems like a lot of useful web sites are free because they get their revenue from ads (I assume).
I do like having the option of choosing which ads I see, but frankly the biggest benefit to me is the increase in speed. I'm getting back my bandwidth!
Thanks
an innocent question
Re: an innocent question
Obviously, it could. However, the extension is not to take the blame as people who have chosen to use this extension would not have clicked the ads anyway. If it was installed on every desktop, without any effort to do for the user, then it would be a great problem for those websites. Fortunately, this is not Microsoft's extension.tipjar wrote:Will widespread use of adblock plus put them out of business ?
The amount of users of Adblock Plus is very tiny when compared to the total of global users(I would say that 3 or 4% of the total internet might use ABP). But all the widespread articles you are probably talking about will actually INCREASE the usage of ABP.. not decrease it. People who didn't know something like this existed before are starting to find out about ABP over the last couple of months. We have always kept a 'low-keyed' approach to ABP and I have taken the 'quiet road' also over the last few years with the EasyList Subscriptions. ABP and its filter maintainers were not really household names.
One article I read yesterday actually referred to ABP saying "Firefox has put out a free addition to their browser …" and also "Adblock Plus is a new service"
. That should give you an idea how little promotion has gone into in for the last 2 years and how little is still known about it now.
We have never tried to really 'fire up' ABP's promotion here. It was more a "word of mouth" increase in users, and I think we all kind of preferred its smaller 'niche' status that kept us out of the web's spotlite. But that may have gone away now with the greater awareness by both users and ad companies because of all this press lately that was actually brought on by the ad sites themselves. Now they have created a "backfire" effect. They are complaining about what a great job it does ... and presto! ... more users are downloading it. The faster the ad people quiet down, the slower ABP will grow. But the articles are increasing so much lately that this is becoming one of those "Mozilla vs IE" type of debates that seem to be all over the web now.
Is it problem for advertisers yet or in the NEAR future? ... its not even at close to being a problem and won't be for a long while as long as these publicity articles don't go on forever. Believe me, if it wasn't for comparing their log files, most sites wouldn't even notice any difference because people who use adblockers don't look at or click ads anyway. They HATE them and/or don't trust them.
One article I read yesterday actually referred to ABP saying "Firefox has put out a free addition to their browser …" and also "Adblock Plus is a new service"
. That should give you an idea how little promotion has gone into in for the last 2 years and how little is still known about it now.We have never tried to really 'fire up' ABP's promotion here. It was more a "word of mouth" increase in users, and I think we all kind of preferred its smaller 'niche' status that kept us out of the web's spotlite. But that may have gone away now with the greater awareness by both users and ad companies because of all this press lately that was actually brought on by the ad sites themselves. Now they have created a "backfire" effect. They are complaining about what a great job it does ... and presto! ... more users are downloading it. The faster the ad people quiet down, the slower ABP will grow. But the articles are increasing so much lately that this is becoming one of those "Mozilla vs IE" type of debates that seem to be all over the web now.
Is it problem for advertisers yet or in the NEAR future? ... its not even at close to being a problem and won't be for a long while as long as these publicity articles don't go on forever. Believe me, if it wasn't for comparing their log files, most sites wouldn't even notice any difference because people who use adblockers don't look at or click ads anyway. They HATE them and/or don't trust them.
0.125% of the Internet Population is actively using Easylist.
Total Internet Population: about 1.2 billion
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Total Easylist Subscriptions: about 1.5 million
http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
As a rough estimate.
Having been on both sides of the field for many years, I've seen internet advertising evolve dramatically year over year. In 97/98, companies were paying thousands of dollars to have their ads delivered with no metrics to ensure even display - all they wanted was to visit the site and see their ad. This moved to impression based advertisement, and then on to click based advertisement. It's moving to conversion based advertisement.
At each phase, people who don't adapt get left behind. Some sites will fail - and others will identify new revenue streams.
As a personal opinion, I don't shed a tear when a group of rowdy people show up late to the party, establish a specific way of doing business and then complain that things are changing. The internet has been changing since it began - adapt or go away.
Total Internet Population: about 1.2 billion
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Total Easylist Subscriptions: about 1.5 million
http://easylist.adblockplus.org/
As a rough estimate.
Having been on both sides of the field for many years, I've seen internet advertising evolve dramatically year over year. In 97/98, companies were paying thousands of dollars to have their ads delivered with no metrics to ensure even display - all they wanted was to visit the site and see their ad. This moved to impression based advertisement, and then on to click based advertisement. It's moving to conversion based advertisement.
At each phase, people who don't adapt get left behind. Some sites will fail - and others will identify new revenue streams.
As a personal opinion, I don't shed a tear when a group of rowdy people show up late to the party, establish a specific way of doing business and then complain that things are changing. The internet has been changing since it began - adapt or go away.
I actually meant to say some kind of adblocking software in general .... and that may be slightly overestimated.ultravioletu wrote:probably he meant 3% of firefox users...
Advertisers worrying about such a tiny percentage when talking about ABP users only simply just shows the immense greed of that business in general. Little do the advertisers seem to realize that all of their "ABP is bad for our business" articles are just sending more and more users to adblockers, scriptblockers, Windows Host File additions, and flashblockers. They are only stirring up user-awareness of these types of programs and are making users increasing irritated about the fact that the internet is getting ridiculous because of its over-commercialization of the web. Television is starting to look like a better alternative (and that's not saying much).
On that point, simply talking publicly about ABP (good or bad) just increases the adblocking user base-crowd every time because you have these 2 views out there:
1) ABP works great!
2) ABP is bad because it works great!
It just all depends on whether you are an advertiser or a user. The larger and smarter companies refrained from ANY comments about adblocking at all for this reason. Google and CNN appear to be very smart and have "no comment". These companies realize that no comments are the best comments. Microsoft, on the other hand, was the only company to comment .....
... even though it was actually a 'pro-ABP' comment.Even a lot of advertisers use ABP. There have been many admissions of that .... especially this little beauty that seemed to appear, but then all activity stopped on the subject when Adsense-servering webmasters realized the truth:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/07/can ... refox.html
It's amazing what a little, tiny "oops" in an EasyList string did just at the same time the July Firefox update came out. Gotcha, you Adsense-serving hypocrites! Did you ever see that one, Danny Carlton?
