FireFox Becoming a Contextual Advertising Hazard?
Written by Pablo Palatnik on September 5, 2007
Looking at my analytics trend for the past couple of months, the Firefox browser has gained tremendous momentum vs. the explorer browser.
[Source: http://ff.asbjorn.it/pages/dlgraph.php]
Firefox has come out with a plugin called Adblock Plus. What does this do? Basically it will block out ads, and more importantly to many of us, block contextual advertising ads such as Adsense.
If the New York Times reports about AdBlock, than it has to have some meaning, atleast to the company it may affect most…Google.
“For now, however, the big players have decided to ignore the phenomenon. Neither Google nor CNN.com, for example, would comment on ad-blocking programs, which can also be added to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7. (The Internet Explorer add-ons are not necessarily free and do not necessarily work as seamlessly as Adblock Plus working with the open-source Firefox browser.)
Wladimir Palant, developer of the open-source Adblock Plus project, wrote in an e-mail message that he had not heard anything from large companies like Google, because, he suspects, the program “isn’t popular enough yet. Attacking it would be a waste of time for these companies.†He estimated there were 2.5 million users of Adblock Plus around the world.
“The numbers are rising steadily,†he wrote, adding that his figures do not “show exponential growth any more (luckily, the server has limited traffic), but there are still 300,000 to 400,000 new users each month.â€
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