A Campaign to Block Firefox Users? 1154
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.
Then screw them.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Then screw them.... (Score:0, Interesting)
Has anybody ever actually seen this site? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:The other advantages of using Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Every client we get that surfs here asks us, "How can we block ad's at my business" we give them the info and they seem to get their IT to do the same.
Blocking Ad's reduces bandwidth use at a company on a very large scale.
Re:Don't use intrusive ads, then (Score:2, Interesting)
Weird that they single out Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
why block ads anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
You see ads if you want to see ads. On the internet, anyway. On TV (not that I watch nowadays), radio (not that I listen to it nowadays) and outdoors (although I try to avoid the centrum nowadays) I find them more annoying.
Logic Smogic? (Score:2, Interesting)
So if FireFox users are so few in number, how can ending their 'resource theft' result in 'tremendous financial rewards'?
Adblock will bring a revolution to the commercials (Score:4, Interesting)
I'ld rather cheat my way past your site. (Score:2, Interesting)
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."
I have another option!
It's a simple 5 step process:
1) If I ever come across a site that throws me at that piece of donkey crap site
2) I will just reopen the same site using your handy dandy babelfish.altavista.com (using firefox), translate the referring site to any language (spanish is fine), then click on the "view this page in it's original language" [the query will come from babelfish, instead of my personal browser, and babelfish doesn't use firefox, it uses a proprietary browser script]
3) I will read the page for a contact address
4) I'll sign said contact address up on the "myfreexbox360.com" style sites
5) I'll inform them that advertisements that they are so fond of are now heading their way, while I enjoy my peaceful ad-reduced surfing, a seperate email to the contact address shall inform them Happy ad-filtering MOFO.
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
Re:Don't use intrusive ads, then (Score:3, Interesting)
bullsh*t economic arguments... (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you buy a paperback that had an advertisement in between every twentieth word on the page?
That's your average website.
The argument that we need to "pay" for these sites to stay in business is similarly bogus. We are all paying for out bandwidth from the ISP's and paying quite a lot in most cases.
This is similar situation to television. The reason for advertisements in the first place was to pay for the broadcasting of the programs which at the time were freely available through the air. Now we have to pay sometimes hundreds of bucks a month to access the programming on cable and the "free" broadcast TV is being shut down. Logically, the advertisements should then either disappear or at least be somewhat reduced, but that isn't the case at all.
In general we are now paying far more than we ever have, for telecommunications services and entertainment that has more advertising on it than ever before.
In the old days, the web was 100% free of advertising and the argument was that once added, the necessary capitalist miracle would occur where everything would be cheaper and better. We would have more access to more information of higher quality and it would be generally free (because of the ads). This hasn't happened at all. The internet is far bigger than it was in those days, but the majority of what has been added is commercial junk. You still can't do *any* of the great things that people assumed were in the future in those days like connect to the local library and read electronic books, etc. We now *buy* digital information with our hard earned cash, but do not own them. We also have to navigate malware and advertisements just to have the privilege of doing so.
The Internet is currently all links and no sausage IMO.
The digital revolution that we were promised has been significantly delayed by these commercial interests.
Re:Nothing to see here. Move along. (Score:2, Interesting)
http://istockphoto.com/DannyCarlton [istockphoto.com]
Re:Some nerve (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Don't do that, it validates stupidity. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Do you have any evidence of this whatsoever? As a devil's advocate, let's assume that the author writing this article has done research showing that Firefox users indeed do not represent a significant amount of purchasing power, what do you have to counter that?
They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric.
I wouldn't say that advertising is "mostly" about brand awareness, especially on the Internet where the ad can easily lead to a direct conversion. (For traditional media, I agree with you.) In fact, I would guess (note: guess. I don't have data) that the majority of the advertising spend on the internet is for ads intended to create click-through. In any case, for the proportion of advertising that isn't branding, click-through is pretty much the best measure we have at the moment for judging their effectiveness.
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.
But a business that would exclude a class of people who are historically known to not contribute to the success of that business seems perfectly sensible to me.
It's fairly obvious to me that the class of people who own a Bentley is a lot different than the class of people who own a Chevy. There's no reason to believe it would be any different with the software people choose. (Look at the stereotypes Apple software has attached to it, for instance.)
Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue.
What the hell does Microsoft have to do with anything? Christ, some people are so obsessive they can't go five paragraphs without bringing in Microsoft or Bush. Leave the conspiracy theories at home and let's have a rational discussion, please.
Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
I don't see how. If the sites don't get served to Firefox users, I doubt that Firefox user would then switch browsers to view the site, then make a note of all the advertisers on it for later use. They'd probably just move on to another site.
I'm not saying that the plan proposed in this article is a good idea in any way, shape, or form, but your rebuttal to it is a little short on... rebuttal.
Re:AdBlock Block... Blocks The Page! (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd better have something that I actively want in order to convince me I should go out of my way to accommodate you, and I'd better be convinced of that before I visit your site. If you have something I want that badly, chances are good it's something I want to buy that only you sell, in which case you are turning away business if you fail to convince me to go out of my way for you; and you're doing this in order to serve ads at me; hence instead of being happy enough with my sale, you want to eek out 0.1% additional by serving me ads, and for this you're turning away a large portion of a market share that is between 10-25% depending on your industry.
If the only thing you have to offer me are words, then I guarantee that I don't want to read it enough to make me fire up a different browser just for you, there is no word-smithing site today that I wouldn't stop visiting if it did something as annoying as this, in fact most would lose me for doing anything even less annoying.
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.
Blame Danny Carlton (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp? domain=whyfirefoxisblocked.com [networksolutions.com]
http://www.google.com/search?q=Danny+Carlton&ie=ut f-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&c lient=firefox-a [google.com]
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp? domain=jacklewis.net [networksolutions.com]
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp? domain=dannycarlton.com [networksolutions.com]
Here's a quote from his "About Jack Lewis" page (which I viewed in FIREFOX through Google's cache):
While I abandoned any real effort at anonymity several years ago, I kept the pseudonym, because so many people knew me by that name.
So, if he's abandoned his effort at anonymity, why didn't he leave any contact info on whyfirefoxisblocked.com? Is it, by chance, because he doesn't want to get slammed back by Firefox users? Thanks, Danny. You're living proof that idiots *can* use the Internet.
Re:Then screw them.... (Score:2, Interesting)
In the end, I chalk this up to a poorly planned Microsoft marketing scheme that is attempting to reclaim browser share artificially. (Hey they all used IE 7 to look at our site so our browser is the best)
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!
Same old, same old (Score:4, Interesting)
If this "grassroots" Firefox-blocking effort takes off, we'll soon have a Firefox extension to spoof the IE UserAgent on any of the sites that blocks Firefox. Oh wait!!! It already exists [mozilla.org], and I'll bet with a little work it could be automated to spoof based on a database of anti-Firefox sites. Of course, all the savvy Firefox users will use this to avoid the block, and only our hapless grandmothers--who don't use Adblock anyway--will be stuck wondering why the Internet doesn't work. And absolutely NOTHING will have been accomplished.
Our interconnected world is increasingly resistant to petty, arbitrary restrictions. Just witness the rise of region-free DVD players, modchips, and third-party ink cartridges... and the ridiculous, heavy-handed responses of the **AA, the game companies, and the printer manufacturers.
Re:"Their" claims (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:2, Interesting)
At one point, I even configured the MIME handlers for images to call through aaview; so if I /really/ wanted to see an image, I could click on it and get a nice color ascii-art view of it. It was glorious. (Since then I changed servers and was too lazy to move the configuration over.)
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This post posted via elinks.
Re:And I question their claims. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no idea what CowboyNeal / et al actually *would* do if the advertising-supported model collapsed, but they already have a subscription system. It's quite cheap, actually. I tend to read Slashdot a lot, and I have them whitelisted in Adblock Plus and then have the adblocking turned on via my subscription (which seems like a silly thing to do, but that's how I tell when my subscription runs out), and a $5 donation lasts a while.
I don't think it would be a huge stretch to go to a subscribers-only format if the ad model collapsed. It would definitely change the character (and perhaps quality) of Slashdot as a community, and it might not work -- I don't know whether people would pay enough to pay for the bandwidth and maintenance and opportunity cost of the editors time -- but if people value it, they'll pay. If they don't, it will disappear.
(Alternately, there are pay-to-register schemes like MetaFilter's that only charge new users, rather than requiring a continuing membership; this works as long as you have a certain number of new people joining all the time.)
It's easy to look at the advertising business model and assume that's the only way things could work. It's not. However, it seems to be the easiest thing at the moment, so that's what people do. But if it stops working, people will do something else; if there is a demand for content then it will still exist, for those who want to pay for it.
Also, to speak of advertising as the only way to operate the Internet (not that you were saying that, specifically, but it's an attitude that I've encountered a lot) ignores the very long time during which the Internet existed without any advertising on it. There was a lot of content that was developed and put up by people, for free, just because they wanted to do that. Even now, there's probably more ad-free content -- in absolute terms -- than there ever was before (just look at Wikipedia, for instance). Certain parts of the internet probably wouldn't survive, and I suspect a lot of "premium content" (news, stocks, etc.) that take money to publish would retreat into pay-to-access zones, but it wouldn't be the end of the 'net.
Necessity is the mother of invention; as long as people put up with ads, that will be the dominant business model. When people get sick of them and decide to block them in large numbers, a new model will develop for the content that people care about enough to pay for. The only content that will ever disappear is the stuff that nobody wanted anyway (as evidenced by the fact that they're not willing to pay for it).
Re:I'd even question his ... what the ... ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, using his logic: because you didn't watch the commercials that pay the employees and shareholders of the TV station, you're stealing from them. Stealing is a crime. You're now a criminal because you fixed yourself a burrito during the advertisements.
Might as well turn yourself in. Can't hide forever, you law-breaking cretin.
Re:I'd even question his ... what the ... ? (Score:3, Interesting)
[interviewer asks why personal video recorders are bad for the industry]
Broadcasting CEO: "Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming."
[interview asks if he considers people who go to the bathroom during a commercial to be thieves]
Broadcasting CEO: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom."
Yep. If you go to the bathroom during a commercial you are violating your contract with the network. You are a thief. However there is a certain amount of tolerance for it. They're willing to overlook a little petty theft during a quick piss break... just so long as you don't go to the bathroom TOO often.
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Re:Then screw them.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Check this out, someone has went out & registered http://www.whyisfirefoxblocked.com/ [whyisfirefoxblocked.com] to counter thier sillyness.