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A Campaign to Block Firefox Users?
rarwes writes "A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.' Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Particularly, don't use ads that jitter about by a couple of pixels, or flash bright contrasting colours. Not only do they not make me want to buy from you, they make me want to avoid *ever* buying from you.
You can send me the ad; I don't understand why I'm under an obligation to look at it or why you have the right to demand that my computer display it.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
So they are worried about ad-blocking and recommend installing Opera which has an excellent content blocker built in. Seems odd.
So is this the point where we starting hearing that blocking ads is just like running out of the store with a pair of blue jeans? I mean really...
At what point do businesses start realize they they are providers of information and not the gate keepers for information...
Ok... let's break this down...
I use Opera too. I use Firefox where Opera doesn't work, or where the *heavy ad filtering* I have in Opera prevents me from seeing something (which is pretty rare).
I put my urlfilter.ini on my website so others can benefit from it. It was lovingly butchered together from various lists I found, and it's much more effective than Firefox's Adblock extension.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Because you're going to HIS site. He gets paid to support said site by your browsing displaying the ads, which is tracked by image requests to the ad server. The ad blocker extensions usually ignore the ads entirely, so the browser doesn't generate any hits for the ad, and the site owner loses money.
He wouldn't have a problem if the ad blocker would still generate a hit but use CSS to make the image hidden on the browser. Of course, the ad companies themselves would then have a huge problem with that, since they're paying people for "displaying" ads nobody sees.
I'd think that a better ad blocker would be one that just blocked flash and converted animated GIFs into non-animated images and then displayed them. A static image isn't that irritating, it still generates hits, and so long as advertisers aren't being dumbasses, their ads will still be seen.
I guess nobody's showed them AdBlock for Opera (or even Opera's built-in "content blocker", admittedly not quite as good as the real thing since it lacks regexps, though), or Ad Muncher for IE.
... does anyone think this may just be a troll / hoax? I've learned never to question the stupidity of people, particularly people on the Internet, but this seems like it's just a bit of a stretch. It kind of reminds me of an Adequacy.org post.
Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?
Also
The blocking that they seem to be advocating that others use is pretty standard "HTTP_USER_AGENT" querying using a PHP script, so it's not like it would be hard to get around. (Incidentally, I've always felt that the USER_AGENT header was something of a bad idea; maybe it's time to kill it, or at least disable replying to it by default?)
What I'm slightly more interested in is how they're blocking the main page. It's not the same as the script that they're pushing; the page actually loads (you can view the source in FF), but it seems to take advantage of some rendering quirk in IE to produce a blank screen when rendered on Firefox. That actually strikes me as a little more subtle, although it's still dumb.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The registrant/administrative contact/technical contact of the website (according to the whois database) apparently runs his own website development company, and (apparently) uses Microsoft Frontpage as his development tool. My guess is that, in the few sites that he has produced for commercial use, he has embedded an edit for Firefox that redirects to his "WhyFirefoxIsBlocked" site.
Indeed!
This is almost always a mistake:
Anyone savvy enough to block ads is probably savvy enough to have their browser present its user-agent as Internet Explorer if necessary.
Necessary is the keyword, and no site dumb enough to do this is necessary. The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power. They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric. A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share. Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue. Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
It's better to punish the offending site by going elsewhere. When you change your user agent, you tell the world that it's OK to do dumb stuff like this.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"...they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks..."
"...whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards..."
No, you're not.
And his
But the ads change. This is NOT like "product placement" in a movie. I cannot "fuzz out" a can of Mountain Dew (tm) in a movie. But whether I have to walk past an ad for Mountain Dew ON THE WAY INTO THE MOVIE or an ad for Coca Cola (tm) does NOT alter the "work" that is the movie.
The frame is not the painting.
Is that some people are going to realize "Hey, I can block ads?!" and then go install Ad Block Plus.
Seems like a lot of speculation to me. As for the small fraction of the internet being firefox users, I can vouch for the fact that everyone I know that use firfox do a considerable amount of shopping online, as for the IE people...most of them stick to Ebay. But that is just my personal groups.
However on a different note seen here (old article 2004 sorry) http://news.com.com/Firefox+users+ignore+online+ad s,+report+says/2100-1024_3-5479800.html
Yes Firefox users click on ads less...it isnt because they use firefox or ad blocker, it is because in my experience firefox users arent click happy, how many of you out there have spent hours removing viruses and spyware and malware because of a click happy IE user.
Many many many projects out there make plenty of cash without advertisements what is the big deal with this site?
I am fine with the site blocking firefox, they simply wont get my business or the business of any of the corporations purchase for, this amounts to a couple hundred grand a year, but what do I know, I am only one lowly firefox user.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I'm jealous of your brain. While I can successfully filter out static ads (e.g. I never notice adverts in magazines or newspapers), these days many web-based ads are animated GIFs or Flash animation, and at least for me, are much more difficult to overlook. The motion and colour changes constantly distract me from the page's content, forcing me to repeatedly have to refocus and thus making me take much longer to make it through an article.
If the web had stuck to non-pop up, non-pop under static ads, I probably wouldn't have bothered with AdBlock Plus. As it stands now, though, I find many webpages to be unusable without it. Frankly, I blame the advertisers: the entire intention of their ads are to grab your attention, and as static ads weren't cutting it, too many of them resorted to being as obnoxious as possible. They're the equivalent of a child jumping up and down screaming, "Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking at me? Look at me! Look at me!"
This firefox user does a lot of online shopping.
Maybe they should deal with the soruce rather than the symptom.
In my case, I don't block ads unless they hit one of four criteria:
1) The play sound
2) They show images that I consider NSFW - i.e. naked people, etc.
3) The drain the resource of my system, with 1GB of memory and over 2Ghz of CPU
4) They have offensive text (suggesting I'm an idiot for not using/buying from them, etc)
So, if I'm blocking your advertisers, you need to find competant advertisers, rather than block me.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
However, I hadn't noticed that this was was blocked in ABP until you mentioned it. [...] reading some site tell me I'm stealing money from website owners isn't going to make me uninstall it. Learning that ABP is blocking not only ads but also sites that badmouth ABP, though, might.
You probably are using the EasyList subscription which blocked that page for a short while,
mainly because the boycott guy personally insulted rick, the author of EasyList.
rick has by now realised that this wasn't too smart a move and removed that filter again.
For the process, see the thread in the EasyList forum
JFTR: Adblock Plus doesn't block anything by default, user added filter rules do.
For what it's worth, I thought that your post was somewhat on the insightful (or at least interesting) side. Whoever modded you as flamebait is a himself an idiot.
Anyways, the average user of Firefox is a lot less likely to "punch the monkey." That does not mean that they spend less money. They just spend less money on herbal viagra.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
exactly, if I find a site with a java popup, it is strike one and I get peeved(weather.com is notorious for this ad), if I get a site where some music or auditory ad comes up it is strike 2 and I will never purchase the product being advertized), if the ad is still there next time I come to the site I will avoid the site as long as I am able.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Attention advertisers! Here is a list of banner ads that I have intentionally clicked on.
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If I need something, I'm actively seeking it. Once or twice, I may have clicked on a sponsored site at the top of a Google search because it was precisely the product or company I was looking for. That's the closest I've ever gotten to clicking into an ad and buying something. Even then, I usually end up price comparing at half a dozen sites (though at least once or twice, I have ended up back at the original site buying it). Quite frankly, I seldom see ads for anything I'm even remotely interested in, as anything that doesn't fill the obvious and immediate need that caused me to search for a product, it isn't interesting at that time.
Want me to take an interest in your product? Wait for me to figure out that I need something that does X, then build something that does X. That's all you have to do. Anything else is just wasting bandwidth from my perspective, and I doubt I"m alone in that. If you want to make your product be the one I choose over the N other products that do X, send out some freebies to people on bulletin boards that talk about X and get them to write honest reviews. If your product gets a lot of good reviews, it is more interesting than a product that only got a few, as almost no professional reviewer ever writes bad reviews, and thus the quantity of reviews tends to be a good indicator of product quality. On the flip side, if it looks like you're astroturfing one of those store sites' comment pages, I'm going to ignore your company for life, so don't even think about that.
Marketing for geeks is simple: don't try to market any product to geeks. If something looks like advertising in any way, it leaves a bad impression automatically, as most geeks prefer to go and search for what they need rather than have a list of things shoved at them that they probably don't need. People who turn on ad blockers are mostly geeks, and thus, their advertising would be counterproductive anyway. Unfortunately, this means that supporting geek sites with advertising revenue could bring in less revenue than a non-geek website, but such is the life of a geek website webmaster.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I manage to fund a website without intrusive ads. A colo'd server is not really that expensive. If you want to pull in revenue you could try selling a useful product or service. For example if you run a free forum website, sell "premium" membership.
Ads that are poorly targeted to my demographic COSTS YOU MONEY. You waste bandwidth trying to send me information about things I won't buy. I would argue well targeted advertising is what is important to the well being of the internet, not all ads. Ad blockers stop the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks sort of advertisements.
I'm sorry if it's so much work to get customers, but the key to having customers that spend money is establishing a relationship with customers and with potential customers. Just pasting fliers all around town or shoving 4 or 5 pop-unders under my browse window is not going to establish a relationship.
TV and Radio have advertisements and commercial skipping is protected mostly because running a broadcast station is quite expensive. Putting a server on the net is only as expensive as the number of hits you get (bandwidth/load), it scales very linearly. If you can't figure out how to turn hits into revenue, stopping ad blocker is only going to keep you from wasting bandwidth on those minority of users. It won't actually fix your broken business model.
The Internet is a very competitive free market, you must adapt to survive!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Why would I want to block perfectly good paying customers who don't have ad block installed, just because they're using the same browser as some who do?
I don't know what you're selling, but you must not be selling much of it if the bandwidth costs for not serving blocked ads (er... yeah, how's that work, exactly?) outweighs your sales revenue, or those of your ad customers.
Never mind the ludicrousness of this from the user perspective; this doesn't even make sense from a business perspective.
Are there any ad blockers for MSIE? Maybe he can block that too - on this site. We won't miss you, and yes, we'll keep making money, unlike you.
Sheesh, learn to do business.
Now they've gone and done it... They went and got /.'s attention. Now there's tens of thousands of /. users who (if they didn't already) are running out and adding adblock to their install of firefox. In another screen I'm composing an email to every single family member in the clan (except 2 which I know are also /. readers) and letting them know they need this extension, how to get it, and how to install it... Get all of us to do this, and in a few days, there will be a million firefox users with adblock installed blocking all manner of sites! The attention from the advertisers being aware of this will cause them to lower advertising pay outs across the board, having a net effect on revenue for ad supported sites many times more than if they kept their mouthes shut! :D I love /.!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I do expect that they will try to force advertising by integrating content with the advertising in active snap-ins, such as Flash. To the extent they do that, they drop off my radar -- I will never see them nor their associated products.
Unfortunately the subscription list maintainers have nothing to do with ABP itself and the two should be VERY separated when criticizing one or the other. Therefore, I think it better to put the blame with the subscription and not on ABP directly. Just my .02.
I'm a Firefox user. I use adblock. I use adblock because I never click on ads anyway. This would be true whether or not I used adblock, or whether or not I used Firefox. I still wouldn't click on an ad. The only ads I would click on are, say, Google ads that come up in response to a search, in which case the ad might be what I was searching for in the first place.
No, they are using my bandwidth to display their unwanted junk on my computer screen. I pay for my internet connection, not the advertiser. If they want to display their content on my screen then they may do so for a price. Please let me know where to send the bill, I'm looking forward to seeing the money roll in.
When I visit a website, it is usually to view whatever they are offering, but not necessarily to view whatever their advertisers are offering. If they cannot afford to run the website without support from my funding for their advertisments then they can go bust. If the product that they are offering (be it something for sale, the answer to a query, or even pron) does not make them enough money then they should not be in business. But by visiting their site I have not agreed to be subjected to all of the extraneous crap that adorns their site.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Is it possible that this is the case because Firefox users are typically geeks who have a much harder time getting laid, rather than having better computers?
Trust me I am all for Firefox (although I prefer Epiphany and Konqueror. Yay choice!) but with trolls like those in TFA about it's suprising nobody has compared Firefox+AdBlock to all of those "Stop spam forever" spam messages (Get Firefox and you won't see anymore ads like me!)
One of the key differences between television and video content and HTML is that HTML is a semantic markup tool, rather than a media which *requires* certain media choices. Although most people browse the web on web browsers that support Javascript and images, some users may use tools which do not support either of these, or support them partially. These may be dependant on media (text-only terminals, screen readers), or user choices (user doesn't trust Javascript, blocks images from specific servers, increases font sizes for extra visibility, etc), or even other reasons beyond the scope of the standards.
I do think that if a PDF reader were to filter out ads embedded in a PDF document that would be another matter, as would a web browser which filtered out *portions of* images, audio files, etc. based on whether they were advertisements or not. In both those cases, presentation is dictated in the format much more clearly than HTML.
However, with regard to HTML, extneding the idea that skipping ads was creating a new infringing work would be problematic. It would potentially ban screen readers, locking blind people out of the internet because such might skip image and flash-based advertisements automatically. It would also raise the following question:
suppose you have a television with a burned out picture tube. A company sponsors a silent, video-only ad with no audio track. Is your broken television creating a new work or just presenting an old one differently? It is, after all, skipping the ad. In short, unlike the court case cited, the original work is left intact, but is presented in a way in which some content is lost. This is very different from editing out offending portions of the content.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Just playing devil's advocate here, but what about sites that don't directly sell anything...only distribute/display content? I would think that slashdot would be an example. CowboyNeil's gotta feed his childin's, right?
That said, there are two problems with internet ads/advertising. First, most advertisements are annoying and distracting to what I am wanting to look at. Those are why *I* use Ad-Block. Second, I am not one of the privacy freaks (I mean that in the nicest way possible), but in order for ads to truly be targeted to me, they will have to profile me. If I could be guaranteed that the information was truly anonymous, then I would willingly let them harvest much more information about me so they could more accurately provide me with potential advertisements that are of interest to me. All that to say, when you combine annoying with useless it equals something that provides *me* with little benefit.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Instead of whining about the fact that people are blocking ads, the industry should be asking themselves _why_ people are doing it in the first place. The fact is, a lot of these ads are annoying as hell (especially those bandwidth-stealing, "Hey Look at me, Damn it!!!" Flash-based pop-ups and scrolling sidebars), and they just plain get in the way of the web experience. If there were a way to incorporate their advertisements into websites without being so grating and annoying then maybe users wouldn't mind seeing the ads anyway. That seems to be a fatal flaw with most marketing types: they feel they must always "shout" loud enough to drown out the competition. The problem is that, on web pages, they often end drowning out the content as well, and sometimes seem either too arrogant or too dense to realize they're doing it.
This space for rent!
Now, the text of the message on that site equates ad-blocking with theft. Assume this is true, what about other similar situations? Look at Microsoft Window preinstalls on computers. We are being told that the cost of the system is being offset by 3rd party apps affectionately called "crapplets" here and that is why bare metal or Linux installs cost more than equivalent Microsoft Windows-based systems. The crapplet guys are paying for the privilege of being on your desktop. Does that not then make it theft to wipe the machine and do a clean install? Also, shouldn't you feel compelled to actually use them, after all someone paid money for them to be there. They have to recoup their investment, don't they?
I don't see any fundamental difference in the two cases. If it is theft to block ads, it must also be theft to remove programs from your computer that a vendor has paid to have put there.
With that in mind, let me fix the wording of your statement: Does it kill you *that* much to have to use the stuff that came preinstalled on your computer? Like it or not, the retail computer market is largely driven by 3rd party app support, and a lot of retail computer vendors would either disappear or be less comprehensive if they didn't have the incentive in place to keep providing low-cost computers. Be careful what you are asking for, you might get it.
Are you serious? Honestly, it seems like more and more paid trolls are invading Slashdot every day. That's the price of popularity, I suppose.
... end of statement. What we do with those signals after that is none of their business. If I choose not to watch their goddamn advertising by looking elsewhere, reading a book, getting laid, taking a leak, or just pressing the fast-forward button, that's just too bad. There's no agreement on my part, implicit or otherwise, that says I have to watch any of it! They are just hoping we will, and hope that it will influence our purchasing decisions. But that's all they get when they plunk down those big advertising dollars: a hope. No guarantee, no agreement, no "reciprocity." I understand that these guys feel threatened by the ability of viewers to technologically avoid viewing commercial advertising, but again, that's just too bad. Not my problem. They don't have a right to force me to watch it, and I don't have any agreement with any broadcaster or network that says they do.
What on Earth are you talking about? Reciprocity? Contract? When did ABC, NBC and the rest start making viewers sign contracts? Contracts are about mutually-agreed upon conditions, usually with some kind of formal recording of said agreement. I think you're confusing the agreement between the content producers, advertisers, and their distributors (the networks and cable companies.) Any agreement between those parties is, well, between them. I am under no obligation to watch anything they spew at me, ad-related or otherwise. Any obligations are between them and don't involve me or any other viewer.
Broadcasters beam signals into the air and we pick them up
Why do people continue to buy into this idea that content providers (whether they be TV broadcasters, satellite/cable TV providers, game console makers, music studios, software houses or anyone else) have some intrinsic right to control the use of their products after they've left the distribution channel? They don't, dude, they never have. The mere fact that you are promoting this bizarreness indicates that you've bought into it (or are a part of it.) Really, it's weird and not in the consumers' best interest.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Internet ads have had plenty of fair shakes. Remember the late 90's and early 00's? Popups, popunders, huge flashing banners, fake windows alerts. When using computers that don't have FF + adblock I still see very intrusive advertising. That's NOT the way to build goodwill with me.
Googles ads are truly the only ones I don't mind. Relevant and non intrusive. ( I agree with you on the relevant ads, they are a resource that is useful) As a whole though, internet advertising has burnt its bridges and I have zero guilt over simply ignoring them. This page simply reinforces my feelings on the matter. Blocking a whole browser because a subset won't view image ads. Especially after stating that they make up so little of the population just seems asinine.
Shrug
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
So is the site full of ads for users without adblock? Because this might not even be some great big plot by microsoft or something. It could just be another bunch of assholes looking to make a quick buck by getting on slashdot. And I'd assume digg a day or two ago.
The Farewell Tour II
If there was no abusive advertising (huge banners flashing and disturbing the user) there was no need to use addon such as adblock..