Firefox Users Bad For Advertisers

rocketjam writes "According to CNET, German advertising technology company Adtech reports that during the months of October and November, Internet Explorer users were more than four times as likely to click on ads than Firefox users were. During the period 0.5 percent of IE users clicked on ads compared to 0.11 percent of Firefox users. Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user."

AdBlock

Having something like AdBlock [mozilla.org] probably doesn't help their click % for Firefox either.

Hooray for extensions!

Re:AdBlock

Perhaps i should write a AdClick Extension;-)

Re:AdBlock

This is modded funny, it is but is it such a bad idea ?
An extra button or shortcut labeled "help this site" wich opens all ads in background tabs ? I would use it.

Re:AdBlock

It wouldn't even need to display them. Just issue the right http GET commands, and not even listen for the result.

Re:AdBlock

I use flashblock [mozdev.org] as well as adblock. I'm not big on having talking flash advertisements sneaking up on me and when I want to view a flash I'll click on the flashplay button.

They make a great team.

Re:AdBlock

Why not take all the ads and display them as a flyer, overlayed across the web page for a few seconds - enough time for anyone sufficiently interested in a product or service to investigate it further by really clicking?

Because people who have an extreme pet peeve for web sites that have the nerve to block all of the content with ads for a few seconds will never come back

Re:AdBlock

It wouldn't even need to display them. Just issue the right http GET commands, and not even listen for the result.

By doing this you will ultimately hurt the site you think you are helping.

When the advertisers look at their ROI and see that all of the traffic from site x is crap, they will pull the ads and the site you were trying to help will need to find another method to support itself.

Re:AdBlock

To save bandwidth, you could do an HTTP HEAD request and find out the length of the file (say 32514 bytes) then issue a GET request asking to resume from 32510, thus saving the advertisers. This would not only register as a completed image view or page view, but would save the advertisers bandwidth as well.

Re:AdBlock

those will drive down the prices people are willing to pay for advertising. sites will notice that their ratio of paying customers to people who click on ads is lower

Fraudlent Ad Clicking on /.

There was a /. story on this recently http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/03/145 0243&tid=217&tid=98&tid=218 [slashdot.org]

Re:AdBlock

There is no easy way to verify where and when someone decided to buy your product. Of course before the web, it was always that way. Suddenly somewhere and someone determined that you could now directly measure how effective and ad was with all this digital technology and tracking. Well guess what. It is NOT much more accurate then measuring effectiveness of non internet ads. That is the root of the problem. I saw an ad for the car maker Saturn on Lycos last month, I did not run out and by a Saturn because of that ad. I doubt anyone did, was the ad effective? I have no idea but this ad was no different then the same ad placed in a magazine. How many people would have saw that? How many people bought a Saturn because of the that? The same thing advertisers are complaining about with advertising on the internet are the same exact issues advertisers before them have been dealing with for at least a century. How to measure effectiveness of an ad campaign.

Ads for sales vs. marketing

What you're describing is pretty much the difference between sales and marketing.

Sales is getting out (by whatever means) and getting people to open their wallet for you in response to your ads/pleas/whatever.

Marketing is creating an awareness, and hopefully "need" for whatever you're selling, but not trying to close the sale right there, or even in the near future. This is especially true for high dollar items like cars.

Tracking clicks is in a sense trying to track sales (usually the seller probably only gets some time from the clicker, not money, though) even though a lot of ads are clearly intended to create a marketing presence. You don't have to click on them for them to be effective-- you just have to see them (over and over) out of the corner of your eye while reading something else. Tracking views is what happens in the rest of advertising (how many people watch that show x how many times the ad appears). Eventually internet advertising will use a hybrid of clicks and views to track.

Re:Ads for sales vs. marketing

"The purpose of marketing is to create confusion. The purpose of sales is to convince the costomer that spending money will end the confusion."

Don't know where I heard that, or if I'm quoting it correctly, but that's the gist of it. :-)

Re:AdBlock

But this may not good to the web, the web user and the advertisement business.

The web has been filled with a wrong idea, which is if I put whatever through the web, at large quantity, some people will click/reply it. The first case of this idea is spam, the second one is banner ad. In most case, those ads are't related with the contain of the pages showing them. Also those ads aren't visually compatible with the pages showing them. More and more of them are become annoying, they are hurting the viewers' eyes and wasting their time and bandwidth. They are diseases of the web and dark side of the advertisement business.

Advertisement should be useful and enjoyable to the viewers. Otherwise, it will harm the advertiser. Also, harm the advertisement business.

Thus for the good of web, web user and advertiser, those irrelevant banner advertisement should be stop.

New smart and useful advertisement will adapt the existance firefox and adBlock.

Alertbox column on online ads

There was a recent AlertBox article [useit.com] in which Nielsen described the most hated forms of Web advertising and how much they hurt users and, in turn, the aggressive advertisers and the sites that use them. It's a small article and quite worth a read.

Re:AdBlock

I use Adblock also, and I love it.

But I've been thinking lately -- is this going to change the Internet dramatically? How many web sites rely on advertising revenue, and won't get it anymore when everybody is filtering banners?

For instance, I now read Slashdot with no ads, and I'm not a subscriber. Adblock decreases the value proposition of a Slashdot subscription.

Re:AdBlock

Turn off Adblock, Adblock will only kill the source of money for most sites. I believe that pop-ups and large overlays and messy flash ads should all die a slow and painfull ad death, but you have to allow some ads through to support the sites that you visit, that and buy their stuff and subscribe. Runnning servers is not cheap/free, and not everyone is nice enough to do it for free/ especially if the bandwidth bills start to mount up. Without ads, google wouldn't exist, and i can think of a few:) other sites that would die if everyone started blocking ads. So dont be so selfish and shortsighted and switch Ablock off and click on a few ads from time to time and buy stuff.

Re:AdBlock

The internet existed before advertising. I'm sure business models can adapt to consumers who wish to be treated with respect.

Re:AdBlock

The internet wasn't as big as it is, and was mainly funded by universities and research teams.

Re:AdBlock

I'm against having people forced to view ads, it's their right to block them should they wish, but I think people should still be more considerate as to the consequences of doing so.

Take slashdot (as an example), if everyone blocks ads, how would they "adapt"? My guess would be A) they won't, or B) they'll be reduced to making paid subscriptions mandatory, and perhaps increasing the number of advertisements masqueraded as genuine stories (such as the recent Cannon printer promotion). Is that really a better alternative?

Re:AdBlock

There's a more binding implicit contract.

Repeat after me: THE STANDARD DOES NOT SPECIFY HOW CLIENTS RENDER

Re:AdBlock

The Internet (specifically WWW) in its current form did not exist before advertising.

True, the s/n ratio was much more reasonable :)

Commercial sites that sell stuff will continue to exist. Research sites will continue to exist. I'll bet most ad supported sites will continue to find a way to exist also. Let's face it the good ones started out with no ads then decided "well hell, this got popular so let's see if I can't make a little bit of money". If they go away, oh well.

If most people want to block ads and that destroys a business model who are we to say that is wrong? There is certainly nothing illegal about and no realistic way to stop them.

Finkployd

Re:AdBlock - will cause evolutionary 'Arms Race'

There is certainly nothing illegal about and no realistic way to stop them.

No way to stop them? AdBlock currently uses a very simple wildcard to filter out Ads. If it's use becomes widespread, you can be sure that sites will become smarter about strucuring their pages so that it is difficult or impossible to block Ads without blocking text and/or image content.

e.g.: Take a page at url mysite.com/index.html . This page just consists of a bunch of iframes, which contain the page content, and the ads. The source of those iframes are from apparently random URLs that all look like mysite.com/?2pg904a82n84 . These content/ad URLs also change with each page reload. How do block the ads next time?

The only reason that a small 'elite' percentage of net users are able to surf Ad-free is that they're not yet a statistically significant group. Whey they become signficant, things will change. Enjoy the Ad-free content while you can!

Re:AdBlock

However, there's an implicit agreement between the provider and user. The provider will not charge you for content, but the content will include some ads. By removing the ads, you're not holding up your end of the bargain.

There is no such agreement, as much as some content providers would like to believe so. Furthermore there is no agreement that my browser will accept cookies, or display images, or interpret javascript, or even render as the author intended.

And if you want to get technical, shouldn't the "agreement" be that the user will click on ads? Simply looking at them does not help the provider one bit.

And again, even if you destroy the business model, what are you left with? There doesn't currently appear to be a business model that can replace ad-supported websites.

No, there doesn't. But realiscally they have nobody to blame but themselves. Most people are not offended by text ads or even non intrusive graphical ads (read: no animated gif, no flash, no monkey punching, etc). By flooding the market with annoying, intrusive, and increasing misleading ads, they have drummed up quite a bit of hatred for the whole concept. Witness the results of this. There is nothing anyone can do about it if the population decides that enough is enough.

Go ahead and block ads if you want, but I don't want to see you crying when more and more sites move to subscription or simply shut down.

I won't. Subscription only sites will only survive if people consider the site to be worth it. For example why would I ever subscribe to NYT when I can get the same news from news.google.com and get multiple sources to boot? Google doesn't seem to be in any trouble these days, and they found a clever and agreeable way to handle ads (text based). So either content providers will innovate like this (funny that a text ad can be considered innovation these days, but it is), of they will die. Just like every other industry when change comes their way. Well, either that or they will try to get ad viewing/clicking enforced by legislation I suppose.

Finkployd

Re:AdBlock

The problem is if ads keep getting more misleading, annoying, and invasive, more and more people will take steps to block them. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just saying that is how it is. You or I cannot change that.

Finkployd

That's not how ads work

And if you want to get technical, shouldn't the "agreement" be that the user will click on ads? Simply looking at them does not help the provider one bit.

You're assuming the point of advertising is to make you click. Strangely, many "new economy" ad execs sold their wares the same way. "Yeah, the users will CLICK and GO to your WEBSITE and BUY THINGS!!!11 ON THE SPOT!!!!111"

Bzzzt! Wrong, Slick.

The point of advertising is (say it with me) brand recognition. You aren't going to buy a Coke* on line when you get thirsty, but if all the sites you visit regularly have a Coke banner, the next time you're in the MiniMart, you might just say, "Hmmm, if I get a Coke then some hottie will hang off me, and there will be dancing and music and lots of sweat!" Then you fork over your dollars for one.

Why do you think there are billboards, and they are successful (in terms of getting companies to pay Viacomm and ClearChannel)? Because they build that brand recognition, not because you are going to run out that minute and buy a Hummer. Why are there ads in magazines? You gonna "click" on one of those, hah? Why does your 1 hour TeeVee show have 40 minutes of "content" (to be very generous) and 20 minutes of ads? You can't buy anything on the spot, so why are they trying to hawk "Hot Pockets"?

Now, it is possible for advertising to adapt to the web, but that won't happen until the ad execs actually figure out why and how the web works. I've sat in enough advert planning meetings (the "token" tech guy) to permanently lose all feeling below my neck due to lack of oxygen, and I can tell you that they don't get it yet. Maybe the current generation needs to die. I dunno.

*Yes, we're all aware that you can buy your dork-related goods [thinkgeek.com] on-line by clicking on the ads. We're talking about the average person here, who isn't interested in a new case, binary clock, or t-shirt that says, "Got Root? [please get me a girlfriend]".

Re:AdBlock

I'm not talking about legal agreements here. I'm talking about not being a dick. You don't own the content. If you don't like how the content is presented (including ads), don't use it. It's that simple!


How sad is it that this is the misguided view people have?

Let me fill you in on how the web works. You put a process on a machine that responds to requests on port 80 (or 443, whatever). A client sends one such request and if you respond with a document, than the transaction is finished. No more obligations, nobody is being a dick, and nothing else has to happen.

I am under no obligation to request images referenced in the returned document, or swf files, or even view the entire document. You gave it to me freely as outlined in the various RFCs that document this process.

Just because one day someone decided that they could make money by putting ads on a site does change the fundamental architecture and process flow of an http transaction. The understanding was always that the end user controlled what and how they interpret this data.

Nowhere did the contract (implied or otherwise) change to dictate that the user WILL view the site with IE and have all possible plugins installed, furthermore they will view all images. Text based browsers still exist, special need browsers exist (for the blind for example), browsers that let you turn off images, browsers that download just the html for offline viewing. This is all perfectly acceptable but it does not support the (poorly thought out) business model that involved ads. There is no "ad blocking" going on here, all that happens is a client chooses not to burden their net connection and computer resources by not requesting additional files that they do not want.

And you are right, the client does not own the content, but nobody ever said they did. Conversely if you are giving me data just because I ask for it, you do not have any control or say in how I use the data. Within legal boundaries, obviously I cannot violate your copyright.

How the content is presented is completely irrelevant, since I control that, not the webserver. This is ALWAYS how it has been. Browsers can change stylesheets, background colors, fonts, choose not to display images, etc. This is how the web works. Trying to pretend it is a print media and that the layout and presentation is decided by the provider is just an exercise in self delusion.

Finkployd

Re:AdBlock

>To think that the Internet today can continue without ads based on some magical elf business model is simply absurd.

Its not a for-profit business model you need to consider. Its the model where a bunch of people want to communicate with each other.

There is a lot of good information/advice in the slashdot comments and no one is paying posters anything.

There are gigs and gigs of stuff on p2p and binary newsgroups and, again, no commerical benefit to those that post them.

The Internet will change, but it doens't have to be a for-profit model.

Re:AdBlock

My general principle with ads is the following: If the ad is not intrusive, and is not flash, (I.e. it doesn't have lots of motion, doesn't eat up cpu cycles, and doesn't flash horrendous colors at me), I will not block it. Otherwise, I will.

Also if I don't like the site I'm on, I will typically block as many ads as I can (like weather.com), but I don't bother with most ads on slashdot.

I just hate really intrusive ads. Unfortunately, the intrusive ads are the ones that get the attention, and thus the clicks, of the users. Maybe if the advertisers actually offered something I wanted, they would see more success.

Re:AdBlock

Weather.com is soo last millenium. Assuming you live in America, try www.noaa.gov [noaa.gov]. They offer point forecasts (within a 5km area), no ads, and you've already paid for them via your tax dollars.

While I love the thought of using the weather underground for weather reporting (it seems like Open Source Weather Forecasting,) I haven't yet mustered up the energy required to figure a proxomitron filter to block the dozens of ads that litter their site. Until I do, the NOAA is still my first choice.

more than four times as likely to click on ads

OMG - hello. I expect everyone in /. agree when I say:

One of the reasons we use Firefox is because it blocks pop-up ADDS. So why would a firefox user go and proactively click on adds after going to all that troubl???
Sheesh, go figure...

The users...

... isn't it rather that the people who use Firefox generally are more 'technical' than the people who use IE, spend more time online, etc, and therefor simply are less likely to click on the advertisements, rather than it being due to Firefox' ad-blocking technology ?

Re:What next?

I think the same argument can be made for Volvo drivers. Volvos are marketed as "safe" cars, which means they're more likely to be sold to "careful" drivers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think what this really should do is tell advertisers that if they get a click-through from a Firefox user, then it's a lot more meaningful in terms of potential sale than a click-through from an IE user. A Firefox user is far more likely to "mean it" if they click on an ad. An IE user's click is probably statistically close to indistinguishable from a random click :-)

Re:What next?

Brings to mind something else - there have been stories of click-through scams in India and China, where people are hired to, well, click the ads and make money.

I remember reading somewhere that most of them were people like housewives and retired folks, looking to make a quick buck. In which case, it's far more likely that those folks will use IE than Firefox.

Perhaps you could have a ratio of sorts - 50 clicks of IE is worth 1 click of Firefox ;-)

Skewed

It seems to me that the reason is fairly obvious. Many users have switched away from IE because of ads/spyware/etc. It would seem to make sense that they would be more aware of how ads function - and not click on them.

One and the Same

The fact that the users use ad-blocking tools and that the users are tech-savvy are really the same issue, not different ones.

(And, aside from that, they can stop most all of the ad-blocking problems by just having the website proxy all advertisement images on it, so they really shouldn't bitch about something with a fairly simple technological solution.)

Re:A different way of advertising...

I block google ads.

if someone goes to the effort of ignoring ads, working around their measures is more likely to piss them off than get their business.

Cant' see any ads

What ads? Where?

Browser ID spoofing

Aside from the obvious Adblock extension, there are also extensions available to spoof one's browser id. I usually set my ID to IE in order to avoid a lot of pages' JavaScript popups telling me that I need to use IE to view their page (which is no longer true).

I'd be curious to see the figures on that.

take 2 coinsiding facts and obscure the link

woah! shh!

This is one of those things where things have got confused. These 2 facts coinside:

- If you've used your computer for longer then you are likely to have discovered a new browser.
- If you've used your computer for only a short time you are experiencing run away popups and all that you get when you click an AD.

^ combine these 2 and remove how you made the connection and you can make it seem like firefox users are just tight.

Don't descriminate against firefox users! I expect the same could be said to any non-windows browser, and any browser that isn't installed already with PCs you buy at Walmart and PC world.

Another thought

I would think that Firefox users are probably the type of people who wouldn't have clicked on the advertisements anyway. So what's the fuss?

Many adverts don't display correctly on firefox

I work for an internet advertising company.

Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox, including some flash/dhtml combos and some dhtml ads.

I don't expect this is the main reason, but it doesn't help.

Also, click through rates and conversion rates are different issues. Probably many more IE users accidentily click on ads or click on them and lose interest than firefox users who are much more likely to only click through on an advert if they are interested in buying. (this is a guess we don't breakdown by browser type at the moment)

Re:Many adverts don't display correctly on firefox

Probably many more IE users accidentily click on ads or click on them and lose interest than firefox users who are much more likely to only click through on an advert if they are interested in buying. (this is a guess we don't breakdown by browser type at the moment)

Your guess holds true with me, at least. When I see an ad, I only click on it if I think it's something that interests me and that I stand a good (50%) chance of buying. Tech stuff appeals to me, as do some t-shirts. So ThinkGeek ads tend to get clickthroughs from me.

Re:Many adverts don't display correctly on firefox

Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox [...]

In that case you aren't writing compliant code, end of discussion.

There are a number of factors...

...to consider. On Slashdot, I definitely click on ads on more than 0.5 percent of page loads. I do it moreso in Firefox since I can load the advertised page in another tab, but the most important reason for me making that click is that the adverts are relevant to me

I think it's important to consider which pages are most popular for IE and Firefox users; it's not a matter of browser but more a matter of the interests of the user. This click-ratio metric would only be relevant if we compared visitors to the same website, and know that the users have the same interests and are just as likely to click. This would be more accurately done in a controlled environment than using pagelogs.

That said, I do accept that Firefox and IE users have different attitudes towards internet use, but the point in TFA about IE users thinking the banner is a system notification made me laugh :)

Next battlefield: Rise of inline popups?

I know there's got to be a better term for them than "inline popups", but I'm not sure what else to call them. I'm talking about pop-up ads that appear *in* the page, on a layer above the page itself, thanks to the wonders of DHTML/CSS/what-have-you.

I've seen a few of these in Firefox. They were actually advertisements for big-name movie releases. They were pretty intrustive and were usually animated, sailing across the page I was trying to view. They were relatively well-behaved, at least, offering a tiny "Close [x]" button in some corner of the ad. Of course there's no guarantee that future ads will be so generous.

Since they don't launch in separate windows, obviously current popup-blocking technology can't touch them. I wonder if this will be the next "big thing" since users and browsers are becoming more successful at blocking popups or tuning them out.

I also wonder how easy they'll be to block. Sadly, I didn't bother to look at the source, but I have a hunch they're served up via a Javascript include file that's hosted on the ad company's servers. If that's how they were done, I guess they would be easy to block... just filter out .js includes from other domains, if that's not something that's already being blocked. If not, they could be really insidious and hard to get rid of.

They're very simple to create.

It is simple CSS. Create a layer, give it a position:absolute, z-level higher than any other (ie. on top), and have a javascript link to hide it. The actual page would just have a
<div class=ad>
<img src=".../banner.jpg">
</div>
Even if you disable JS, the only thing you disable is the close button. I've seen pages with this, but not the ads. The ads are still caught by the image filter, but I have to close the empty css layer.

Experience; only themselves to blaim...

Begining IE: Ooooo! A button! Why yes, my computer does run slowly!

During IE: Grr...you wouln't lie to me again, would you? *click!*

Experienced with IE: Liars! Every last one of you!

Begining Firefox: I can block those liars? Wo-ho!

(Yep, I know that you can block adds in IE...it's just not integrated or as well done.)

Who's fault is it anyway?

Anyone up for quick round of the blame game?

I blame the advertisers themselves. Ads kept getting more and more intrusive, abusing pretty much everything they could. In response, users started blocking pop-ups, keeping an anti-ad hosts file and generally ignore advertisements altogether. Firefox is merely another thing that makes it easier to get rid of ads. If they'd remained the nice, standard non-moving/flashing/whatever banners, users might not hate them this much.

Don't block ads, block popups , Flash, Anims, etc

I realize that Ads are important revenue stream for sites that I visit. So I "generally" don't block ads. I occasionally see something legit I am interested in.

But I do have pop-ups blocked and I have installed flashblock(great plugin), which stops all annoying flash from playing, and I have shut down animated gifs. So my screen doesn't look like the all singing all dancing crap of the universe.

After the above settings I do use adblock plugin, to block something crappy that does sneak through. I have about 3 lines in my adblock file. One of them is *newegg* after some hideous unkillable flash they had annoyed me. Newegg doesn't sell to Canada anyway.

Lately I see more Ads flowed in the middle of text I am trying to read. These I generally just use nuke anything to get out of my way. Bother me enough and I will adblock the server.

Simple Rule guys: keep your ads from ruining my experience or I will. If you want me to even see your adverts, you better play nice.

My experience with Google Adsense ads

I've been running Google Adsense [google.com] ads on GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks [goingware.com] since september. Overall, it's paying really well, I have found hope that I could make a living someday writing full-time, earning my pay through ads on my articles. I'm so sick of programming, but I like to write...

However...

Nearly all of my pay comes from clicks on my article about legal music downloading [goingware.com]. The ads are almost always for p2p apps, and I'm dismayed they often claim what they do is legal. But there is a clickthrough rate of over 20%, which is quite unheard of in web advertising.

Most of the site has more technical articles. My article on C++ style [goingware.com] is my second most popular (after the music downloading article), and gets ads for obviously useful and legitimate things like software development tools and training courses, but it has a clickthrough rate of just 0.1%. Rates for other technical articles are similar. In the three months I've published adsense ads, I've made only $10 from the ads in the C++ style article.

My experience running ads on other sites is that a typical response rate is 0.5% - 1%, so it seems technically-inclined readers click ads far below the average.

In between are some articles on marketing, web design and such, that get about a 1% response rate.

Although the ads on my music article pay well, I don't like what they're advertising, and feel they call my credibility into question. I've started approaching the manufacturers of mp3 players directly, to offer them ad space on the page, but have had no takers yet.

I don't think I could come up with another high-response article very easily, so my plan is actually to write more technical articles, with the hope that by posting new content regularly, I can encourage repeat visitors. It is very hard to get someone totally new to visit a website, but I don't think it's so hard to get a visitor to come back for a second time.

Also I'm going to completely change the page design to use a very nice CSS/XHTML design my wife Bonita made for me. Right now my pages look very homemade, and I expect some visitors hit the back button because my pages look so poor. Here's a peek [goingware.com] at the new design, I think once I have it up all over my site I will get more repeat visitors.

Good! Time to decommercialise the Internet...

Okay, call me an old duffer but wasn't there a time prior to the commercialisation (Ugh! I hate that word, too much like "commercials"!) of the Internet when military/academic people just used the ARPAnet for the communication of important information? I don't ever recall any business being given the right to make money on the Internet...

The attitude of big business today seems to be that every human must be forced to stare at billboards, glossy pages in magazines, TV ads and Internet banners displaying product after product after product - even to the point where the 3" diameter circle on the top of a petrol pump at a petrol station has to display an ad for a bar of chocolate...

So, just as much as big business seems to be given the right to try to force-feed me endless advertising, I reserve the right to read a book on a tube train so I never have to stare up at the ads over the windows, the right to use my remote control to switch to another channel during the ad breaks and the right to use any goddamn browser and asblock program I want to keep this constant assault of visual garbage away from my eyes.

They Should Read Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041206.html

And I quote:

"Summary:
Studies of how people react to online advertisements have identified several design techniques that impact the user experience very negatively.

Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience: people repeatedly encounter ads as they surf the Web, whether they're visiting the biggest portals, established newspapers, or tiny personal sites. Most online advertising studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser, using simple metrics such as clickthrough rates.

Unfortunately, most studies sorely neglect the user experience of online ads. As a result, sites that accept ads know little about how the ads affect their users and the degree to which problematic advertising tricks can undermine a site's credibility. Likewise, advertisers don't know if their reputations are degraded among the vast majority of users who don't click their ads, but might well be annoyed by them.

Now, however, we have data to start addressing these questions. At my recent User Experience 2004 conference, John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay presented a large body of research on how users perceive online advertising. Here, I offer a few highlights from their presentation (my comments on their findings are solely my responsibility)."

Change the way you advertise (I prefer text ads myself, I'm 100% more likely to click on one of them then any sort of graphical ad) and you'll see more people clicking on ads.

Probably Not Good News for Firefox

As much as the end users like it, isn't this sorta like a TV that blocks advertising and blurs out product placement intelligently? Seems like if such a TV existed, content producers who earn their revenue from advertising would try to find ways to break such a device, or at the very least make their content incompatible enough so that end users would be forced to use a device that could receive the adverts in order to receive the other content. I know as end-users we don't like it, but this is an equation of economics. If Firefix can block all advertising as we wish, and our usage of the sites that generate revenue off of said advertsing continues, what incentives to content producers on the web have to make sure that their sites remain Firefox compatible?

Stop Thinking!

Interesting. People thoughtful enough to select a browser rather than having a browser chosen for them also seem disinclined to click on anything that blinks.

The solution is obvious. Ban thinking now. Our economy depends on it.

Bad thing?

IE is a good stabiliser if nothing else, because they (or at least they used to) have a pretty much total share of the browser market, they controlled the basic default browser configuration. They kept the entire net advertising industry stable for years because most people are too lazy to install ad-blockers or change their settings. But a mass migration to firefox will change all that, Mozilla will then control the default configuration and pretty much have the power to shut down the entire net advertising industry overnight. Of course an industry like that wont go down easily: they will adapt and find new ways to push adverts, you would probably have to answer a specific question about an advert to get into a site or maybe something even more obtrusive than even the worst pop ups. Which is why we should probably bite the bullet and keep the market stable - obviously we don't have to look at adverts, but for the sake of making some advertisers happy, we might have to make sure everyone else does?

Is this a "bad" thing?

The relationship between the advertiser, the producer and the consumer has become so hopelessly damaged and the internet is only making it worse. as soon as some tool that enables a consumer to control the flow of advertising, someone else freaks out about how this is bad for business. We have the asshats in the television industry bemoaning TiVO and other devices that allow you to skip commercials. They even go so far as to claim that you agreed to a contract when you bought your TV that you WILL watch commercials. Then of course at the very extreme end of the asshat spectrum, you have spammers. Anything that is anti-spam is unfairly killing their "business model". Here's a clue, GET ANOTHER FUCKING BUSINESS MODEL. And soon we are sure to have some people who want to break or weaken any software that allows a user to control online ads. I really wish I had access to that gaint /etc/hosts file in the sky so I could redirect ALL ad hosts to 127.0.0.1 permanently.

Getting back on track here... it's simple Mr. Advertiser. If I want to buy a product, I will. You don't need to MAKE me buy it with your ad, you just need to get it into my head that it might do what I want. If I don't choose to buy it, TOO BAD!! Stop trying to justify your existence by pouring money into advertising and marketing and put that money into research and development to make a better product. Remember, the real hierarchy of the consumer/advertiser/producer relationship is this:

1. The producer only exists to serve the consumer
2. The advertiser is simply a notification agent (hmmm... could be replaced with a small shell script)
3. The consumer is the monarch in this relationship and should have little to do other than make a decision about where to spend their money.
4. The stockholders are the least important as they should be happy to even get a cent from this deal.

But it's all screwed up today and people are slowly being zombified by the current corrupted version of capitalism. Resist folks. Resist. You'll be better off for it.

Bad metric

The big question is how many click throughs turn into sales. More than once I clicked on an advert by mistake and ended up just closing the ad. I did not buy anything. What we will need is more directed ads for stuff we want.

Comparing Percantages

This is probably redundant, but 0.5% of 90% of the browser share so far outwieghs 0.11% of 5% of the browser share that advertisers, who ought to interested in the actual absolute numbers of people who click on the ads, probably don't give a crap whether or not Firefox users click on anything. I'm using Firefox now, and have done for a while. I know I am in the minority. It's nice. I click on ads once in a while. But I also block pop-ups.

Advertisers should concentrate on what they are doing that only gets 0.5% of the most used broswer out there to click on their ads. Make the ads better (from the point of view of the *consumer*) and more people will click, regardless of the browser.

Haven't read every post, but...

Is it possible that more IE users click on ads because they A) still pop up, and B) Look like actual Windows messages to the [ahem] average user? Just a thought...

Users *WANT* Ad Blocking.

Over the last four years I've been converting IE users to Mozilla/Firefox. The single feature that gets their attention is built-in popup/banner blocking. Like me, they are tired of popup/banner ads.

I also refuse to install Flash, it is a tool that has been abused by marketers. Transparent animation over page text was the last straw, that went WAY over the line for intrusion. Whenever I visit a Flash-only website, I complain to the webmaster for a non-Flash page. It usually gets results.

For some, ad-blocking is an ergonomic issue

I'm guessing that 'ergonomic' is the correct term. I find most animation very distracting, to the point that I just can't read a site with multiple flash animations and animated gif's. It gives me a headache in no time. It was so bad that I used to have to un-install flash on some Linux distro's (before click-to-play). If I can't block the animation on a site, I usually just go somewhere else. I usually don't block any non-animated ads. Sometimes I'd move a window over a particularly annoying ad if I had to use the site. I used to use privoxy but with the combination of adblock and click to play, the Internet is ussable again for me.

I wish advertising people would realise that they are totally alienating some potential customers.

Re:most sites i go to

Try this one:

http://gauret.free.fr/adshare/adshare.php [gauret.free.fr]