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

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps i should write a AdClick Extension;-)

Re:AdBlock

[Proaxiom]

I use Adblock also, and I love it.

But I've been thinking lately -- is this going to change the Internet dramatically? How many web sites rely on advertising revenue, and won't get it anymore when everybody is filtering banners?

For instance, I now read Slashdot with no ads, and I'm not a subscriber. Adblock decreases the value proposition of a Slashdot subscription.

Re:AdBlock

[Anonymous Coward]

This is modded funny, it is but is it such a bad idea ?
An extra button or shortcut labeled "help this site" wich opens all ads in background tabs ? I would use it.

Re:AdBlock

[Freexe]

The internet wasn't as big as it is, and was mainly funded by universities and research teams.

Re:AdBlock

[mmkkbb]

those will drive down the prices people are willing to pay for advertising. sites will notice that their ratio of paying customers to people who click on ads is lower

Re:AdBlock

[nolife]

There is no easy way to verify where and when someone decided to buy your product. Of course before the web, it was always that way. Suddenly somewhere and someone determined that you could now directly measure how effective and ad was with all this digital technology and tracking. Well guess what. It is NOT much more accurate then measuring effectiveness of non internet ads. That is the root of the problem. I saw an ad for the car maker Saturn on Lycos last month, I did not run out and by a Saturn because of that ad. I doubt anyone did, was the ad effective? I have no idea but this ad was no different then the same ad placed in a magazine. How many people would have saw that? How many people bought a Saturn because of the that? The same thing advertisers are complaining about with advertising on the internet are the same exact issues advertisers before them have been dealing with for at least a century. How to measure effectiveness of an ad campaign.

The users...

[leonmergen]

... isn't it rather that the people who use Firefox generally are more 'technical' than the people who use IE, spend more time online, etc, and therefor simply are less likely to click on the advertisements, rather than it being due to Firefox' ad-blocking technology ?

Skewed

[ntsf]

It seems to me that the reason is fairly obvious. Many users have switched away from IE because of ads/spyware/etc. It would seem to make sense that they would be more aware of how ads function - and not click on them.

Cant' see any ads

[Anonymous Coward]

What ads? Where?

Another thought

[q-the-impaler]

I would think that Firefox users are probably the type of people who wouldn't have clicked on the advertisements anyway. So what's the fuss?

Many adverts don't display correctly on firefox

[mpcooke3]

I work for an internet advertising company.

Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox, including some flash/dhtml combos and some dhtml ads.

I don't expect this is the main reason, but it doesn't help.

Also, click through rates and conversion rates are different issues. Probably many more IE users accidentily click on ads or click on them and lose interest than firefox users who are much more likely to only click through on an advert if they are interested in buying. (this is a guess we don't breakdown by browser type at the moment)

Re:A different way of advertising...

[rokzy]

I block google ads.

if someone goes to the effort of ignoring ads, working around their measures is more likely to piss them off than get their business.

Re:What next?

[plover]

I think the same argument can be made for Volvo drivers. Volvos are marketed as "safe" cars, which means they're more likely to be sold to "careful" drivers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think what this really should do is tell advertisers that if they get a click-through from a Firefox user, then it's a lot more meaningful in terms of potential sale than a click-through from an IE user. A Firefox user is far more likely to "mean it" if they click on an ad. An IE user's click is probably statistically close to indistinguishable from a random click :-)

Next battlefield: Rise of inline popups?

[John_Booty]

I know there's got to be a better term for them than "inline popups", but I'm not sure what else to call them. I'm talking about pop-up ads that appear *in* the page, on a layer above the page itself, thanks to the wonders of DHTML/CSS/what-have-you.

I've seen a few of these in Firefox. They were actually advertisements for big-name movie releases. They were pretty intrustive and were usually animated, sailing across the page I was trying to view. They were relatively well-behaved, at least, offering a tiny "Close [x]" button in some corner of the ad. Of course there's no guarantee that future ads will be so generous.

Since they don't launch in separate windows, obviously current popup-blocking technology can't touch them. I wonder if this will be the next "big thing" since users and browsers are becoming more successful at blocking popups or tuning them out.

I also wonder how easy they'll be to block. Sadly, I didn't bother to look at the source, but I have a hunch they're served up via a Javascript include file that's hosted on the ad company's servers. If that's how they were done, I guess they would be easy to block... just filter out .js includes from other domains, if that's not something that's already being blocked. If not, they could be really insidious and hard to get rid of.

Experience; only themselves to blaim...

[Spoing]

Begining IE: Ooooo! A button! Why yes, my computer does run slowly!

During IE: Grr...you wouln't lie to me again, would you? *click!*

Experienced with IE: Liars! Every last one of you!

Begining Firefox: I can block those liars? Wo-ho!

(Yep, I know that you can block adds in IE...it's just not integrated or as well done.)

Who's fault is it anyway?

[theM_xl]

Anyone up for quick round of the blame game?

I blame the advertisers themselves. Ads kept getting more and more intrusive, abusing pretty much everything they could. In response, users started blocking pop-ups, keeping an anti-ad hosts file and generally ignore advertisements altogether. Firefox is merely another thing that makes it easier to get rid of ads. If they'd remained the nice, standard non-moving/flashing/whatever banners, users might not hate them this much.

Don't block ads, block popups , Flash, Anims, etc

[guidryp]

I realize that Ads are important revenue stream for sites that I visit. So I "generally" don't block ads. I occasionally see something legit I am interested in.

But I do have pop-ups blocked and I have installed flashblock(great plugin), which stops all annoying flash from playing, and I have shut down animated gifs. So my screen doesn't look like the all singing all dancing crap of the universe.

After the above settings I do use adblock plugin, to block something crappy that does sneak through. I have about 3 lines in my adblock file. One of them is *newegg* after some hideous unkillable flash they had annoyed me. Newegg doesn't sell to Canada anyway.

Lately I see more Ads flowed in the middle of text I am trying to read. These I generally just use nuke anything to get out of my way. Bother me enough and I will adblock the server.

Simple Rule guys: keep your ads from ruining my experience or I will. If you want me to even see your adverts, you better play nice.

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.

Comparing Percantages

[White Roses]

This is probably redundant, but 0.5% of 90% of the browser share so far outwieghs 0.11% of 5% of the browser share that advertisers, who ought to interested in the actual absolute numbers of people who click on the ads, probably don't give a crap whether or not Firefox users click on anything. I'm using Firefox now, and have done for a while. I know I am in the minority. It's nice. I click on ads once in a while. But I also block pop-ups.

Advertisers should concentrate on what they are doing that only gets 0.5% of the most used broswer out there to click on their ads. Make the ads better (from the point of view of the *consumer*) and more people will click, regardless of the browser.

That's not how ads work

[Safety Cap]

And if you want to get technical, shouldn't the "agreement" be that the user will click on ads? Simply looking at them does not help the provider one bit.

You're assuming the point of advertising is to make you click. Strangely, many "new economy" ad execs sold their wares the same way. "Yeah, the users will CLICK and GO to your WEBSITE and BUY THINGS!!!11 ON THE SPOT!!!!111"

Bzzzt! Wrong, Slick.

The point of advertising is (say it with me) brand recognition. You aren't going to buy a Coke* on line when you get thirsty, but if all the sites you visit regularly have a Coke banner, the next time you're in the MiniMart, you might just say, "Hmmm, if I get a Coke then some hottie will hang off me, and there will be dancing and music and lots of sweat!" Then you fork over your dollars for one.

Why do you think there are billboards, and they are successful (in terms of getting companies to pay Viacomm and ClearChannel)? Because they build that brand recognition, not because you are going to run out that minute and buy a Hummer. Why are there ads in magazines? You gonna "click" on one of those, hah? Why does your 1 hour TeeVee show have 40 minutes of "content" (to be very generous) and 20 minutes of ads? You can't buy anything on the spot, so why are they trying to hawk "Hot Pockets"?

Now, it is possible for advertising to adapt to the web, but that won't happen until the ad execs actually figure out why and how the web works. I've sat in enough advert planning meetings (the "token" tech guy) to permanently lose all feeling below my neck due to lack of oxygen, and I can tell you that they don't get it yet. Maybe the current generation needs to die. I dunno.

*Yes, we're all aware that you can buy your dork-related goods on-line by clicking on the ads. We're talking about the average person here, who isn't interested in a new case, binary clock, or t-shirt that says, "Got Root? [please get me a girlfriend]".

Re:AdBlock - will cause evolutionary 'Arms Race'

[goatpunch]

There is certainly nothing illegal about and no realistic way to stop them.

No way to stop them? AdBlock currently uses a very simple wildcard to filter out Ads. If it's use becomes widespread, you can be sure that sites will become smarter about strucuring their pages so that it is difficult or impossible to block Ads without blocking text and/or image content.

e.g.: Take a page at url mysite.com/index.html . This page just consists of a bunch of iframes, which contain the page content, and the ads. The source of those iframes are from apparently random URLs that all look like mysite.com/?2pg904a82n84 . These content/ad URLs also change with each page reload. How do block the ads next time?

The only reason that a small 'elite' percentage of net users are able to surf Ad-free is that they're not yet a statistically significant group. Whey they become signficant, things will change. Enjoy the Ad-free content while you can!