I just love this debate going on about AdBlock Plus, the Firefox add-in that allows a web surfer to block virtually all of the advertisements on the web. Failing to discover which users might have AdBlock Plus installed in their Firefox browsers, some webmasters (decades later, I still love this word) are now blocking Firefox entirely, redirecting users to this cheesy page instead.
Fundamentally, this scuffle reminds me of The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss. In that story, two groups of androgynous furry creatures are at odds because one group butters their bread on the top and the other butters theirs on the bottom. The cause for their animosity doesn’t relate to the AdBlock debate, but the ensuing battle can be seen as a metaphor for every conflict waged in technology since the earliest days of human civilization.
Each of the two groups of furry people create progressively more outrageous devices to attack the other with what seem like small rubber balls. A simple slingshot gives way to a multiple-slingshot, then a device to catch the opponent’s rubber balls and launch them back, and so on, until they finally create a device that is cleverly metaphorical for the atomic bomb and find themselves at a total impasse.
Similarly, websites can only block Firefox if they know you’re using it, so adjusting the UserAgent string and the certain responses or structures returned or available through JavaScript trivially masks that fact. Firefox detection and AdBlock detection schemes will simply get more complex and consequently the masking countermeasures will, too. It’s a futile battle.
The moral of the story is this. As a webmaster, you simply cannot completely control the way your content is manipulated and displayed within your visitors’ browsers. You can follow best practices and accommodate the majority’s needs, but fundamentally the content is malleable. Once the data leaves your server through that pipeline we call the Internet, it is at the whim of the end-user.
So what are the implications for online advertising? Chris Soghoian over at C-NET tries desperately to wrap his infantile brain around the discussion in an article entitled Who blocks the (ad) blockers? (on C-NET Blogs). His conclusion is that blocking advertising on a website is essentially theft because you are using their resources and consuming their offerings without “paying” by being exposed to their ads. No matter how valid that point may be from a sterile, legal perspective (e.g. by viewing this site you agree to be bound by the terms of the viewing contract which stipulates that you must be continuously bombarded by our advertising, yadda yadda), it’s not a very friendly way to do business.
When ReplayTV was “sued … out of existence” as Soghoian said, it represented the first step toward the obsolescence of the “block ad.” TiVo and the cable companies’ homebrew DVR boxes allow viewers to effortlessly skip over advertising, and they do.
Advertising is a symbiotic relationship. Advertisers expose their consumer base to information and hype about their products or services, and those consumers who find the products or services interesting or valuable may purchase them. Exposing people to products they are interested in is a public service. Consumers want to buy things and companies want to sell things, so it’s just a matter of connecting the two. Effective advertising is that which efficiently exposes potential consumers to the products or services being sold without becoming such a burden that they want to block them.
Again, ReplayTV was the harbinger of the fall of block advertising. Soon, mark my words, all advertising on TV will be replaced by product placement. Technology exists to make block advertising obsolete because nobody actually wants to watch it. It is the job of the advertiser to find a delivery method that is effective, and part of the effectiveness formula is whether users will find a way to avoid, block, or skip over it because they are too annoyed or too disinterested.
Ignoring the fact that all Firefox traffic on the face of our planet amounts to about 15% on a really, really good day, and that the number of Firefox users who are actively using AdBlock Plus or a variation on it is much smaller than that, I truly believe that advertisers should see this as a wake-up call.