A Storm Is Brewing....
Apparantly the web isn't free....
If you've paid attention to your RSS feeds over the last few weeks you've seen the frequent whispers, occassional rants, and sporadic outbursts over the Firefox fueled ad blocking situation. Everyone has an opinion and battle lines are being drawn. Tight knit families of zealots are being torn apart and stronger than steel bonds are bending under the heat. The battle crys are drowning out any semblence of reason.
Do you really deserve to filter the content sent to your browser in a piecemeal format? Do you really have the right to have your ads displayed with your content?
There are so many crucial decisions to be made and as usual the uninformed have gotten loud, the disenchanted have gotten nasty, and the disillusiouned are powering up on the disruption to fight for whatever cause tickles demented fancies. What a mess....
Let's bring order to this chaos...join me and my friends as we hash this out.
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Firefox users and attitudes to online ads
One of the reasons the Adblock Plus plugin has been so popular among Firefox users – to the extent of being actively promoted by the Mozilla Foundation, the organisation behind the browser – is that as a group they tend to have a particularly strong dislike of ads.
Research has shown that the typical web user most likely to click on a website ad is female and aged between 30 and 45; she is either a homemaker or a part-time worker, has a lower-middle class to middle-class level of disposable income and a high school (but not a college) education. She lives in a mid-western State and is more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. She is very unlikely to be surfing with Firefox.
In other words, she is deeply unlike the majority of web-savvy, ad-blind, activist, blogging Firefox users at the cutting edge of web culture who get upset by plugins like Adblock Plus. Common sense suggests that the people who get most annoyed by online ads are those least likely to click on them: for the time being, advertisers can probably afford not to worry about upsetting these people by blocking their favourite browser.
The danger for advertisers, of course, is that the cutting edge of today is the mainstream of tomorrow. If user attitudes harden against online ads – as they may well, if the ads continue along the trend of being intrusive and bandwidth-hungry – website owners who make money via ads, and, therefore, the ad serving companies themselves, may have a severe problem on their hands.
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