Internet Ad Controversy

I am growing very tired of people whining about advertising revenue being lost due to ad blocking. I guess they've been bothered by the television stations going bankrupt from lost advertising, and the loss of the lawsuit in 1979 that allowed it... Err, wait a minute. Television stations are still selling advertising space, and last time I checked, it's not cheap either. So, what is the big difference from VCR's to web advertising?

Well, to start off, web advertisers are addicted to clicks. And this is one primary reason people are blocking ads in the first place. Advertisers enjoy routing their customers through their servers, instead of just putting it on the primary server the web page is on. Many of these advertising companies must not be in touch with their watchers. Most people, whether they know it or not, have suffered terrible load times due to advertisements on a page. These are not things they wanted to load, but instead, things forced at them for profits and exposure. They could at least maintain their servers and keep load times quick. Take a lesson from Google's ads and servers. And, after saying this, I must clearly state my opinion on the internet advertising business. I completely agree with the role advertising plays, and that it is there for a reason. It's not practical to get rid of it. It helps consumers get the information they want, while it helps web site owners pay for their hosting and maybe make some additional profit to keep them working on their sites. Web advertising still must evolve a lot (and if any high traffic site wants to hire me, I'd gladly help your advertising evolve!).

One thing that helps keep advertising on a page is entertainment. They have learned this time and time again with television, yet, when it comes to the internet, many ads are still dull. Anything more than text, should be entertaining. Any time spent watching an ad is good or bad exposure, depending on the reaction of the consumer to the ad. If it's a fast loading, entertaining ad, people are more likely to spread it, talk about it, and remember it. That is the nature of the internet. One of the best things for an advertiser is for their ad to go viral.

I'm not worried about anyone blocking Firefox (at least anyone worth while on the internet, the people blocking Firefox might as well not exist). Lets face it, there isn't an easy way of telling if someone is using an ad-blocking program, and blocking all of a group of users is lost profits, exposure, and potential purchases. Anyone interested in keeping a good image with users, while at the same time keeping their focus on profits, would not cut Firefox users off.

Now, lets pretend that for some odd reason, everyone who uses the internet suddenly learned how to install ad-blocking software and plug-ins, and suddenly the world wide web became straight to the point. I seriously doubt it would be the downfall. It may affect a few, but, I guess that would be Darwinism at work. Weeding through websites, and deciding what worthy few would stay around. And another thing, I seriously doubt if everyone had ad-blocking software, that it would be the downfall of internet advertising. Nope, we would still have to live with it. Thats when creative individuals come up with alternative ways of advertising. Even I have many ideas that are certainly implementable and profitable, for web 2.0 sites, as well as the ordinary static sites.

Big advertising sites such as Google have smartly decided not to comment on this issue as it may bring up too much publicity for ad-blocking software and do damage. They think the best way to keep everything the way it is, is to keep quiet and let all the fuss about advertising die down. I think that is the best move for this situation.

Now, lets look at one of these few individuals who seem to not be worried about advertising revenue in the first place because they blocked all Firefox users, but still raise a fuss. According to New York Times, only 2.5 million people use Adblock Plus, one of the more popular ad-blocking plugins, and Firefox has been downloaded more than 400 million times. This site, whyfirefoxisblocked.com, is a site some people redirect Firefox users to. The latest post on the site seems rather mad towards all German people (the developer of Adblock Plus is German), saying as a German, the developer doesn't understand the concept of standing up for their rights. It goes on to say that German people "placidly" allowed Hitler "to turn their nation into his own personal toilet...". He also says that Americans had to come in and rescue the world from their mess. He also goes on to say that as an American, he has to stand up for what's right. Well, he is one of those few that will end up going extinct going by his attitude. He is obviously against open source software, seeing how he expects Mozilla to disallow the Firefox plugin (obviously he picks and chooses which rights to stand up for). And while I'm talking about his comments, let me just point out that it was America who sat "placidly" around when the world was already in war. It was America who decided it wasn't its problem, and it was America who wrongly made that decision. And don't get me wrong, I love America, I just felt I had to point that out.

To end on an educational, yet humorous point, I noticed that at the end of the latest post on whyfirefoxisblocked, the word cohorts is used. Well, I just had to point this out. While taken out of context, the word cohort in computer science means; to quote wikipedia, "A cohort in computer science is a group of proximate data and/or operations. It is a mean for scheduling to achieve greater performance." So thank you whyfirefoxisblocked, at least you see why some of us block ads; the developer is trying to achieve greater performance!!

Anyone else have an opinion about the state of web advertising and the future of it? Leave a comment, I'd love to hear!