I don’t think you should say that Firefox has put out anything.

1. There is no entity called FireFox.
2. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Mozilla the organization behind Firefox does not put out plugins like this. Someone else put this plugin on the market as have a number of other people with similar plugins that block ads.

That all said, I started a firestorm on another plugin’s discussion group by asking people why they feel it is necessary to block advertising and take for free the hard word of others. They just don’t seem to get it that without ads, that a lot of the content they like will never see the light of day. It is ridiculous.

Brad

Posted by Brad Nickel | 2:58 pm on September 4, 2007.

Excuse the typo in my comment. Here is what I meant to write:

I could be wrong, but I don’t think Mozilla the organization behind Firefox puts out plugins like this. Someone else put this plugin on the market as have a number of other people with similar plugins that block ads.

Posted by Brad Nickel | 3:00 pm on September 4, 2007.

Wow, this passes for news? We have been talking to our clients for years about this plug in (it was not put out by Firefox or Mozilla) and its ramifications. Uh, welcome to the playground.

Posted by jackson | 3:02 pm on September 4, 2007.

Two parts of your article are incorrect:

Firefox has put out a free addition to their browser … ”
Incorrect: Firefox does NOT have anything to do with Adblock Plus. ABP is a 3rd-party open source plugin for Mozilla products.

“Adblock Plus is a new service …”
Incorrect: Adblock Plus is a year and a half old and picked up after its predecessor, “Adblock” (the first Adblock is about 3 years old).

Adblock Plus is not new … it has just gained much more press lately.

Posted by rick752 | 3:26 pm on September 4, 2007.

I have adds on my site http://www.ajediam.com. and I share a fine revenue with them.
But I believe that Adblock is a great innovation if you give the consumer the possibility to choose between visiting the web without or with ads.
Just give the freedom to visitors to accept or deny adds when viewing a site.
Advertisers do not pay for that! They pay per click.
The same must be possible on TV!
Jan from Antwerp / Belgium / Europe

Posted by Jan Huts | 3:31 pm on September 4, 2007.

I blogged about this add-on today:

http://ckpcreative.com/lohad/?p=903

One element of the story I didn’t blog about, though, was the “theft” component. I saw that in the NYTimes story, and I’m not so sure “theft” is a proper characterization in this context.

Do ads I don’t want “steal” bandwidth from my ISP and time from me?

As a Web advertiser, I want results — which is why pay-per-click and pay-per-performance are attractive models. If a certain percentage of users block ads, it simply takes a bit longer to reach the PPC/PPP/CTR levels I’m looking for. The notion that my impressions are being “stolen” is erroneous — they don’t happen in the first place, so there’s nothing to steal.

Besides, what advertiser with a functioning cerebral cortex wants to *insist* that their ad appears in front of a user who clearly *doesn’t* want to see it?

Ultimately, though, I think this all speaks to an issue that online marketers need to address and embrace: short-term gains from crappy banner ads can’t hold a candle to valuable content that speaks to a potential customer (and, in turn, raises the authority of the company’s site, feeds SEO, etc.).

Posted by Craig | 4:39 pm on September 4, 2007.

Without advertising the Web will become a playground of nerds, slackers and perverts…publishers won’t have the time to invest on the Web…

This senario may sound good to some, but we all know that producing content requires effort and expense…if the pay-per-view model worked it would already have been adopted…but it don’t…

Without advertising there would be NO MASS MEDIA…I for one would miss the opportunity to stay informed and to get to find a neutral and unbiased view of products and services…

Let’s stop wasting our time on the “no advertising is good advertising” bull…Good content is expensive to produce…

Maybe the no ad faction should be pushing for Government subsidies for content production…kinnda like the totalitarian governments of the world…sniker sniker

Keep the web full and free…by supporting The Auto Channel’s wonderful, terrific and good looking advertisers.

Posted by Bob Gordon | 11:08 am on September 5, 2007.

First of all, this is old news. Second of all, the tool is terrible. You go from seeing every annoying ad to seeing nothing. Zip. A lot of features don’t work. I couldn’t get my gmail login to work, etc. It’s a joke. Try something out before you go on and on about it.

Posted by Jason Lancaster | 11:29 pm on September 5, 2007.

@Jason:

Yeah the “tool is terrible”. That’s would be why the 10s of thousands of these articles and forum comments are all over the internet these days …. because it is terrible? Not one of these articles ever said that it doesn’t work (because it most certainly does VERY well)! The problem is that it DOES work … and quite well if used with the right filtering. ABP does not block anything by itself so it is not the program that is the problem. Use the right set of rules (either your own or a good subscription) and you will not any have major problems. Any major problems are quickly fixed by myself for the EasyList subscriptions.

BTW, I use gmail all the time and have no problems logging in ….

rick752 - author of the EasyList subscriptions for ABP.

Posted by rick752 | 2:21 pm on September 7, 2007.

If this is illegal or not ethical, then how is DVR or Tivo legal? Seems like you must consider the two together. You’d think at some point, the advertisers are going to say enough, this isn’t for me, and then it will get nutty for folks like me. (I work in advertising.) Really, it gets to the core of some really interesting thinking by the consumer these days. We don’t want to pay for content, we don’t want to pay for music, we don’t want to pay for movies. We don’t even want to watch the commercials that make the content free for us in many cases. We will, however, steal it, download it, bit torent it, whatever, and blame someone else to make us feel better for basically being thieves. Still, this is the world we live in, and we gotta figure out how to do our jobs in it.

Posted by kramer | 1:51 pm on September 8, 2007.

It’s not ‘technically committing theft’. I’ve signed no agreement to watch or allow ads, and I’m under no obligation to look at them or interact with them - just as getting up to go to the bathroom and missing a commercial isn’t “stealing TV”. Trying to imply that ad avoidance is theft is technically ridiculous and morally dubious at best. Instead of trying to shame people into looking at your ads, how about making ads less annoying and putting fewer of them on a page?

Posted by Hoqenishy | 8:59 am on September 10, 2007.

Adblock plus is used because users are sick and tired of ‘in your face’ web advertisement. Blame the users then, not Adblock plus. Better yet, think of some better way to do commercials on the web.

Posted by Patrick Cheung | 10:19 am on September 13, 2007.

Theft? I see you understand hyperbole. Removing ads from web pages is no more theft than skipping over television ads or paging past ads in a magazine.

And if the ads hadn’t gotten so blinky and distracting in the first place, users wouldn’t be so intent on blocking them. So in that case, blame the creators of those annoying ads, not the users.

Television is dealing with the same issue right now because of DVRs. Will television die? No. Neither will the internet.

Now stop complaining and go find a better way to fund your web site than by annoying the hell out of all of your visitors.

Posted by Craig | 5:52 pm on September 13, 2007.