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.

Comments

Don't use intrusive ads, then

[Gordonjcp]

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.

Some nerve

[crashfrog]

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.

WTF

[The MAZZTer]

Ok... let's break this down...

1. If I use Adblock, this implies that I specifically installed it because I do not want to look at ads, so I block them.
2. It follows that if Adblock was not available, I would ignore ads and not click on them. If they are particularly irritating, I would complain to the webmaster, so Adblock actually does them a favor.
3. Also, since I know enough to find and install Adblock, I can also find and install ad blockers for other browsers.
4. It also follows that since I can install Adblock, I also may know about other extensions such as User Agent Switcher, which can be used to easily bypass most browser checks. The rest can be bypassed by using Adblock to block whatever JavaScript file is checking for browser-specific behavior. Yay for irony!
5. Furthermore, if I see a website which discriminates against me based on browser use, I am likely to go elsewhere where I can be treated more fairly.

Re:The other advantages of using Firefox

[Shagg]

Any website that thinks running Ad Blocker is "stealing" and "resource theft" is probably not worth visiting in the first place. Sounds to me like their only purpose is ad revenue.

Yawn.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?

Also ... 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.

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.

Don't do that, it validates stupidity.

[twitter]

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.

What a non-sequitur spewing moron....

[mellonhead]

"...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..."

Re:The other advantages of using Firefox

[pla]

I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site.

Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet manages to pay the bills. Curious...

Re:The other advantages of using Firefox

[Shagg]

Or they are people who, Oh don't know - run a useful and popular free-to-use Web resource and need to raise some income to maintain the service. Which means, of course, that they're legally guaranteed to make an income and anyone who doesn't pay them is breaking the law.

I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site. I must have missed the part where slashdot was blocking firefox.

Running a free website and trying to use ad revenue to help fund it is fine. That's not what we're talking about here. The idea that such a site is legally entitled to that ad revenue is absurd. If you can only exist based on ad revenue, and enough people don't want to view your ads that would put your existence in jeopardy... maybe you shouldn't exist. To claim that a user is stealing from you by choosing to not view your ads is delusional.

Re:Then screw them....

[jimstapleton]

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.

Re:And I question their claims.

[dgatwood]

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.