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A Campaign to Block Firefox Users?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Aug 17, 2007 11:15 AM
from the bad-ideas dept.
from the bad-ideas dept.
rarwes writes "A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.' Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.
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Technology: The Morality of Web Advertisement Blocking 974 comments
An anonymous reader writes "There has been some recent coverage of the over-hyped boycott of Firefox, in response to the rising popularity of the Adblock Plus Firefox extension. A recent editorial on CNET looks into the issue, and explores the moral and legal issues involved in client-side web advertisement blocking. Whereas TiVo users freeload on the relatively fixed broadcasting costs paid by TV networks, users of web ad-blocking technology are actively denying website owners revenue that would otherwise go to pay for the bandwidth costs of serving up those web pages. If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right? "
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The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, by not visiting the site, you're not visiting the ads either, and therefore still stealing. I suggest you turn yourself in now.
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Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty obvious that ad-blocking web sites IS akin to resource theft...
Oh, it's obvious, is it? Is it theft if I visit the site but never click on the ads? What if I click on all the ads but have no intention of buying anything? Tell me, what else is obviously theft when I am reading a page on the web?
Parent
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm building a site based on ad supported revenue. Since it is going to be targeted towards a largely technical audience I expect most (if not all) of the ads to be blocked. I myself use ABP. My solution is two-fold. I point out to my guests that the site is supported by advertising revenue, and provide a "donation ware" link that allows those who would rather not see ads, but still want to support my site to donate towards my hosting and bandwidth bill. I realize that this may not be viable for others, but for me at least, it is fine.
-nB
* Any ad that tends to blink, scroll, move, clash, interrupt the content, etc. is burdensome. Google text ads are the answer to this.
-nB
Parent
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet manages to pay the bills. Curious...
Parent
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot has a few advantages over other sites:
1) It had a large presence before ad-blocking became easy enough for the average user to do.
2) It's extremely targeted, so its advertising space is more valuable.
3) It's part of a large network of other, similarly-targeted, sites which gives it more clout when negotiating sales of ad space.
For a site without those advantages, say one just starting out, people costing bandwidth without contributing ad hits might make the difference between being in the black and being in the red.
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Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
I clicked on a few of them, they're apparently on the same box (all slashdotted at the moment), but when they load you can see how crappy and devoid of content they are.
Anyway, no "useful and popular free-to-use Web resource" here.
Parent
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Running a free website and trying to use ad revenue to help fund it is fine. That's not what we're talking about here. The idea that such a site is legally entitled to that ad revenue is absurd. If you can only exist based on ad revenue, and enough people don't want to view your ads that would put your existence in jeopardy... maybe you shouldn't exist. To claim that a user is stealing from you by choosing to not view your ads is delusional.
Parent
Don't do that, it validates stupidity. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is almost always a mistake:
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Necessary is the keyword, and no site dumb enough to do this is necessary. The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power. They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric. A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share. Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue. Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
It's better to punish the offending site by going elsewhere. When you change your user agent, you tell the world that it's OK to do dumb stuff like this.
Parent
Firefox porn-spendings (Score:5, Informative)
If anything, they should block users with dialup connections and Windows 9x, as they purchase less than average.
Thats our experience in the porn-business.
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Don't use intrusive ads, then (Score:5, Insightful)
Pulled them out of... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not actually that interested in looking up their arses.
Some nerve (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Some nerve (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:justified (Score:5, Insightful)
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can't view (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait...
Re:can't view (Score:5, Funny)
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Hm... (Score:5, Insightful)
At what point do businesses start realize they they are providers of information and not the gate keepers for information...
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok... let's break this down...
Text of page (Score:5, Informative)
The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.
While blanket ad blocking in general is still theft, the real problem is Ad Block Plus's unwillingness to allow individual site owners the freedom to block people using their plug-in. Blocking FireFox is the only alternative. Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers..
Since the makers of Ad Block Plus as well as the filter subscriptions that accompany it refuse to allow website owners control over their own intellectual property, and since FireFox actively endorses Ad Block Plus, the sites linking to this page are now blocking FireFox until the resource theft is stopped.
Netscape users can simply set their browser to IE mode to continue to enjoy the site that sent you here. FireFox users can use Internet Explorer, Opera or Netscape (in IE mode) to access it. FireFox users also have the option of using the IE Tab plug-in which uses the IE rendering engine to display pages, but also disables the Ad Block Plus plug-in.
If you are offended by the Mozilla Corporation's endorsement of dishonesty please contact the Mozilla Foundation and ask them to stop empowering internet theft.
Other comments on ad blocking...
PopularTechnology.net--Why Adblock is bad for the "free" Internet
Adblock effectively robs these free sites of their revenue. If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more. These are the same free sites users of Adblock frequently visit. The irony is how this is self-defeating.
Information Technology and the Law--Firefox Adblock a Contributory Infringer?
Judge Posner, elucidating the holdings of WGN v. United Video (1982) among others, reasoned in Aimster that:
"[Commercial-skipping] amounted to creating an unauthorized derivative work, namely a commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright owner's income from his original program, since "free" television programs are financed by the purchase of commercials by advertisers."
Like free television broadcast content supported financially by advertising, much of the content on the Internet today is distributed free to end-users for an indirect exchange of advertisement revenue. When a user loads an ad-driven copyrighted website, he produces a copy of the work due to the inherent architecture of the Internet. If this user is using Adblock to screen out annoying advertisements, he is creating an unauthorized derivative work analogous to skipping television commercials. By the letter of copyright law, this practice would most likely be seen as an infringing use.
You have reached this page because ... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, what the hell, we'll ask anyway, are you SURE you don't want to enlarge your penis?
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It's not about the adblock (Score:5, Informative)
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
I guess they just can't make decent HTML that work on every browser, and blame firefox for their stupidity, after all, things that work good and nice in IE display crappy in Firefox. Instead of learning to do proper HTML, they just want to block firefox so everyone will see their crappy html right.
Nothing to see here. Move along. (Score:5, Informative)
Registrant:
Danny Carlton
19724 E Pine St
Suite #149
Catoosa, Oklahoma 75015
United States
See also, dannycarlton.com/net/org.
Living in Cantoosa must leave you with lot of time to ponder the big questions and it seems like Danny has plenty of opinions. His blog (which does not, by the way, block FireFox) includes his opinions on everything from homeshooling to "Jesus Camp" to pet food names like "baby-poop mustard" (to distinguish the fancy kind from plain yellow) and "booger bread" (9-grain style).
All we have here is an insignificant Internet rant. Nothing original there.
Wearing a gas mask around me is forbidden! (Score:5, Funny)
What a non-sequitur spewing moron.... (Score:5, Insightful)
"...whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards..."
Re:AdBlock Block... Blocks The Page! (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I hadn't noticed that this was was blocked in ABP until you mentioned it. I clicked the link, and it failed to load, but I thought it was because these people hadn't tested it in Firefox and it just didn't render. The fact that it didn't appear because ABP blocked it is troubling. I use ABP to get rid of ads, not to get rid of "slander". Why does ABP block a site just because it is critical of ABP? If I'm using ABP, it's because I find it incredibly useful (which I do), and reading some site tell me I'm stealing money from website owners isn't going to make me uninstall it. Learning that ABP is blocking not only ads but also sites that badmouth ABP, though, might.
Parent
Re:AdBlock Block... Blocks The Page! (Score:5, Informative)
Because the guy who wrote the site coded it that way. http://dannycarlton.com/AD_Tools/ABPfence.php [dannycarlton.com]. He offers tools to block anyone running ABP from any site.
He's had a long-running feud with the Adblock team https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/discussio ns/comments.php?DiscussionID=3060&page=3 [mozilla.org].
Parent
And I question their claims. (Score:5, Interesting)
I do almost all of my holiday and gift shopping on-line.
On the other hand, I seldom ever click on ads on sites. I shop at on-line stores. I find those stores by searching Google for the items I want.
So, yeah, it probably isn't in your best interest to have me use up your bandwidth to read your opinions on X in the hope that I might click on an ad for Y or Z.
My time is valuable. What are you offering me as incentive to read your ads? Specifically.
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Funny)
Bottom line? Be patriotic! Use IE 6! Punch the monkey! Take out a loan you can't afford!
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"Their" claims (Score:5, Informative)
Given his nuthood I'd assume that he *thinks* that Firefox users are less likely to buy things online, and that somehow in the broken fragments of his mind that becomes transmuted into "demographs show that...." Pleanty of other nutbags do the same thing, why shouldn't he?
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I'd even question his ... what the ... ? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're not.
And his
But the ads change. This is NOT like "product placement" in a movie. I cannot "fuzz out" a can of Mountain Dew (tm) in a movie. But whether I have to walk past an ad for Mountain Dew ON THE WAY INTO THE MOVIE or an ad for Coca Cola (tm) does NOT alter the "work" that is the movie.
The frame is not the painting.
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Interesting)
When websites use simple banners or in-content ads, I never have any real problem with it. The exception to that is when the ad itself is far slower than the website calling it - then it chaps my hide.
However, popups drive me nuts. It's annoying, it's extraordinarily rude to their users, and it only serves to amplify the ruthlessness of advertisers - who are starting to demand popups in order to gain advertising revenue. When site advertisements begin to reach that point, it approaches the level of spam.
Regardless, it's the option of the person creating the website. If they want to block users who block popups, that's their right - though there is always a cost, in this case the loss of a stimulating audience that more often than not is either too young to have money to spend, or tend to have quite a bit of expendable cash (since it's usually the intelligent and resourceful who have both the good jobs and the popup blockers). If the goal of the site is to make money (something only cyberhippies seem to dislike), then by all means protect your profits. But if the population violating those ads is truly statistically insignificant, then why care (unless they're eating significant bandwidth)?
If I were in his position, I'd base my assertion purely on popup blockers hiding themselves - which becomes a bit more of a hostile act, no matter how many people (like me) love it. It's purely a circumvention tool, and not one that falls under fair-use since they haven't paid for squat.
Then again, I'd love to be part of any (non-radical) campaign to apply public pressure to some of the more... exuberant... advertisers - not to end web advertising (I enthusiastically embrace capitalism), but to keep it under some sort of realistic control.
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Insightful)
I do expect that they will try to force advertising by integrating content with the advertising in active snap-ins, such as Flash. To the extent they do that, they drop off my radar -- I will never see them nor their associated products.
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they are using my bandwidth to display their unwanted junk on my computer screen. I pay for my internet connection, not the advertiser. If they want to display their content on my screen then they may do so for a price. Please let me know where to send the bill, I'm looking forward to seeing the money roll in.
When I visit a website, it is usually to view whatever they are offering, but not necessarily to view whatever their advertisers are offering. If they cannot afford to run the website without support from my funding for their advertisments then they can go bust. If the product that they are offering (be it something for sale, the answer to a query, or even pron) does not make them enough money then they should not be in business. But by visiting their site I have not agreed to be subjected to all of the extraneous crap that adorns their site.
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyways, the average user of Firefox is a lot less likely to "punch the monkey." That does not mean that they spend less money. They just spend less money on herbal viagra.
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:5, Insightful)
Attention advertisers! Here is a list of banner ads that I have intentionally clicked on.
{}
If I need something, I'm actively seeking it. Once or twice, I may have clicked on a sponsored site at the top of a Google search because it was precisely the product or company I was looking for. That's the closest I've ever gotten to clicking into an ad and buying something. Even then, I usually end up price comparing at half a dozen sites (though at least once or twice, I have ended up back at the original site buying it). Quite frankly, I seldom see ads for anything I'm even remotely interested in, as anything that doesn't fill the obvious and immediate need that caused me to search for a product, it isn't interesting at that time.
Want me to take an interest in your product? Wait for me to figure out that I need something that does X, then build something that does X. That's all you have to do. Anything else is just wasting bandwidth from my perspective, and I doubt I"m alone in that. If you want to make your product be the one I choose over the N other products that do X, send out some freebies to people on bulletin boards that talk about X and get them to write honest reviews. If your product gets a lot of good reviews, it is more interesting than a product that only got a few, as almost no professional reviewer ever writes bad reviews, and thus the quantity of reviews tends to be a good indicator of product quality. On the flip side, if it looks like you're astroturfing one of those store sites' comment pages, I'm going to ignore your company for life, so don't even think about that.
Marketing for geeks is simple: don't try to market any product to geeks. If something looks like advertising in any way, it leaves a bad impression automatically, as most geeks prefer to go and search for what they need rather than have a list of things shoved at them that they probably don't need. People who turn on ad blockers are mostly geeks, and thus, their advertising would be counterproductive anyway. Unfortunately, this means that supporting geek sites with advertising revenue could bring in less revenue than a non-geek website, but such is the life of a geek website webmaster.
Parent
Yawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?
Also
The blocking that they seem to be advocating that others use is pretty standard "HTTP_USER_AGENT" querying using a PHP script, so it's not like it would be hard to get around. (Incidentally, I've always felt that the USER_AGENT header was something of a bad idea; maybe it's time to kill it, or at least disable replying to it by default?)
What I'm slightly more interested in is how they're blocking the main page. It's not the same as the script that they're pushing; the page actually loads (you can view the source in FF), but it seems to take advantage of some rendering quirk in IE to produce a blank screen when rendered on Firefox. That actually strikes me as a little more subtle, although it's still dumb.
Parent
Re:Then screw them.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they should deal with the soruce rather than the symptom.
In my case, I don't block ads unless they hit one of four criteria:
1) The play sound
2) They show images that I consider NSFW - i.e. naked people, etc.
3) The drain the resource of my system, with 1GB of memory and over 2Ghz of CPU
4) They have offensive text (suggesting I'm an idiot for not using/buying from them, etc)
So, if I'm blocking your advertisers, you need to find competant advertisers, rather than block me.
Parent
Need a "stinking website" blocker (Score:5, Interesting)
If Internet Explorer came with a feature such as Adblock, you would effectively wipe out thousands of websites, maybe more.
To which I'd reply:
* Ad blockers are widely available for IE and many proxy servers as well (which block ads to ALL browsers--our corporate proxy blocks all sorts of content, including nearly all adservers). Yet all these adservers and crappy ad-laden websites continue to exist...unfortunately.
* There are "Thousands of websites" (I'd say MILLIONS actually) that SHOULD be wiped out because their net contribution to the 'net is negative. If ad-blockers give consumers the ability to decide which sites those are then they perform an important public service.
I'd also offer this argument: pushing excessive ads to my computer is theft of my processor time and bandwidth. I pay for my computer and for the monthly internet access so I can use them for what I wish. I am a reasonable person and expect that a lot of content is ad-supported and would find a reasonable amount of advertising to be acceptable. I am used to commercials consuming about 30 percent of TV programming time, and TV has survived on that for a long time. However, in recent times I have found that many sites literally devote MORE THAN HALF of their real-estate to advertising.
The advertising is getting far too distracting as well: I regularly encounter pages with multiple flash and/or video-clip ads, and ads that play sound without asking or warning. Advertisers go out of their way to create workarounds to pop-up blockers and use AJAX, Java and Flash technology to make ads that dance all over your screen, obscure the real content and generally annoy the user as much as possible.
The rights of corporate advertisers must be balanced with the rights of individual consumers, and, sorry to say Mr. Ad Exec, individual rights trump those of corporations. If you wound back a bit and limited your ads to 1/3 screen real-estate or relied on more considerate techniques like interstitial ads that played their message and politely got out of the way so the real content can be enjoyed, then the popularity of ad-blocking would be reduced substantially.
By the way, would you like to know why your precious ad servers are blocked at our corporate proxy, listed right alongside things like myspace and horse porn? It is because they started generating so much traffic on our corporate WAN that the ads actually had a noticeable impact on overall intranet performance. That's right...big, responsible corporations are committing "mass theft" because they are tired of their bandwidth being stolen by aggressive advertisers!
Parent
Re:Then screw them.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Please elaborate in what way is it "much more effective"? Is it better at blocking ads? I have been using adblock and have not seen an ad in so long that when i go to another computer who doesn't have it installed i am always surprised by page layouts that i frequently visit.
I like opera too and use it but from your statement i'm wondering if there is something that i could benefit from that you know about opera over firefox, or if it was one of those blanket statements that has no real validity to back it up (if that's the case that's not necessarily a bad thing, after all this is the internet and
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Re:Then screw them.... (Score:5, Funny)
Right now the slashdot effect is more effective than any adblock extension :-)
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Re:Then screw them.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Then screw them.... (Score:5, Informative)
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