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."

Comments

AdBlock

[ack154]

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

Hooray for extensions!

Re:AdBlock

[plover]

Weather.com is soo last millenium. Assuming you live in America, try www.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.

Re:AdBlock

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this time with proper formatting.

Just cut and paste the following into a text file and then import it into adblock.

[Adblock]
/\D\d{2,3}x\d{2,3}\D/
goog lesyndication
us.yimg.com/a/
/\/buy_assets\//
/ [\W\d_](top|bottom|left|right|)?banner(s|id=|\d|_) [\W\d]/
/[\W\d](double|fast)click[\W\d]/
/[\W\d] click(stream|thrutraffic|thru|xchange)[\W\d]/
/[\ W\d]value(stream|xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]dim e(xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d](onlineads?|ad(ban ner|click|-?flow|frame|ima?g(es?)?|_id|js|log|serv (er|e)?|stream|_string|s|trix|type|vertisements?|v |vert|xchange)?)[\W\d]/
/(hot|spy)log/
/[\W_](b( an|nr)s?|jump|redir(ect|s)?|stat)[\W_]/
/\W(cy|r) ?c(ou)?nt(er|ed)?\W/
/p(artner|ing\.cgi|romotion) /
reklama
/sp(onsor|ymagic)/
/top(100|cto)/

Re:AdBlock

[vrtladept]

I think the poster is on to something. BTW, adblock with filterset G http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ doesn't block the google ads on the right, but does take care of all the rest. It greatly enhances my Internet experience!

Re:AdBlock

[Ishin]

I use flashblock 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:most sites i go to

[jlar]

Try this one:

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

Re:Many adverts don't display correctly on firefox

[daveewart]

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

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

They're very simple to create.

[Kjella]

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.

Fraudlent Ad Clicking on /.

[TFGeditor]

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

Ads for sales vs. marketing

[bitingduck]

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.