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.

Pulled them out of...

[mypalmike]

Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.

I'm not actually that interested in looking up their arses.

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.

Re:Some nerve

[AoT]

It's like how the newspaper companies force you to read the classifieds.

can't view

[excelsior_gr]

I tried to look at the website but I can't. Any ideas?
Oh, wait...

Re:can't view

[grassy_knoll]

Finally, a reason why I didn't RTFA!

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.

And I question their claims.

[khasim]

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.'

I do almost all of my holiday and gift shopping on-line.

On the other hand, I seldom ever click on ads on sites. I shop at on-line stores. I find those stores by searching Google for the items I want.

So, yeah, it probably isn't in your best interest to have me use up your bandwidth to read your opinions on X in the hope that I might click on an ad for Y or Z.

My time is valuable. What are you offering me as incentive to read your ads? Specifically.

Re:And I question their claims.

[empaler]

(This bit was copied for the purposes of critique under the fair use doctrine.) Thief! Hiding behind legal mumbo-jumbo doesn't change that you thievingly stole their article text!

Re:And I question their claims.

[LithiumX]

It would help to use proper citation methods, such as author and source. :)

When websites use simple banners or in-content ads, I never have any real problem with it. The exception to that is when the ad itself is far slower than the website calling it - then it chaps my hide.

However, popups drive me nuts. It's annoying, it's extraordinarily rude to their users, and it only serves to amplify the ruthlessness of advertisers - who are starting to demand popups in order to gain advertising revenue. When site advertisements begin to reach that point, it approaches the level of spam.

Regardless, it's the option of the person creating the website. If they want to block users who block popups, that's their right - though there is always a cost, in this case the loss of a stimulating audience that more often than not is either too young to have money to spend, or tend to have quite a bit of expendable cash (since it's usually the intelligent and resourceful who have both the good jobs and the popup blockers). If the goal of the site is to make money (something only cyberhippies seem to dislike), then by all means protect your profits. But if the population violating those ads is truly statistically insignificant, then why care (unless they're eating significant bandwidth)?

If I were in his position, I'd base my assertion purely on popup blockers hiding themselves - which becomes a bit more of a hostile act, no matter how many people (like me) love it. It's purely a circumvention tool, and not one that falls under fair-use since they haven't paid for squat.

Then again, I'd love to be part of any (non-radical) campaign to apply public pressure to some of the more... exuberant... advertisers - not to end web advertising (I enthusiastically embrace capitalism), but to keep it under some sort of realistic control.

Re:And I question their claims.

[thanatos_x]

You evil, evil person. Do you have any idea the effect you're having on the american economy by not viewing the '510,000$ mortgage for $1491' ads? Or what about the 'Punch the Monkey and get a PS3' Not embracing these ideals that we can get something for almost nothing is completely un-American.

Bottom line? Be patriotic! Use IE 6! Punch the monkey! Take out a loan you can't afford!

Re:And I question their claims.

[dgatwood]

Attention advertisers! Here is a list of banner ads that I have intentionally clicked on.

{}

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.

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.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

[linuxwrangler]

whois whyfirefoxisblocked.com...
Registrant:
      Danny Carlton
      19724 E Pine St
      Suite #149
      Catoosa, Oklahoma 75015
      United States

See also, dannycarlton.com/net/org.

Living in Cantoosa must leave you with lot of time to ponder the big questions and it seems like Danny has plenty of opinions. His blog (which does not, by the way, block FireFox) includes his opinions on everything from homeshooling to "Jesus Camp" to pet food names like "baby-poop mustard" (to distinguish the fancy kind from plain yellow) and "booger bread" (9-grain style).

All we have here is an insignificant Internet rant. Nothing original there.

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.

Re:Then screw them....

[kosanovich]

"and it's much more effective than Firefox's Adblock extension."

Please elaborate in what way is it "much more effective"? Is it better at blocking ads? I have been using adblock and have not seen an ad in so long that when i go to another computer who doesn't have it installed i am always surprised by page layouts that i frequently visit.

I like opera too and use it but from your statement i'm wondering if there is something that i could benefit from that you know about opera over firefox, or if it was one of those blanket statements that has no real validity to back it up (if that's the case that's not necessarily a bad thing, after all this is the internet and /. and we all do it from time to time.)

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...

You have reached this page because ...

[wsanders]

... you are a intelligent and not the sort of obvious retard we can fool into becoming a customer.

Ah, what the hell, we'll ask anyway, are you SURE you don't want to enlarge your penis?

Firefox porn-spendings

[Anonymous Coward]

As the owner of a large european Porn network/site we cannot confirm these numbers. Actually according to our sales, it's the other way around, FF users are more likely to buy (porn) as they're often more experienced users with faster machines and used to buy stuff online.

If anything, they should block users with dialup connections and Windows 9x, as they purchase less than average.

Thats our experience in the porn-business.

Re:The other advantages of using Firefox

[visualight]

It's run by some guy named Danny Carlton who seems to have long list of thrown together websites that he's hoping to make money from. You can see the list at dannycarlton.net. Looks like somebody bought a book on how to get rich blogging from home.

I clicked on a few of them, they're apparently on the same box (all slashdotted at the moment), but when they load you can see how crappy and devoid of content they are.

Anyway, no "useful and popular free-to-use Web resource" here.

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....

[trolltalk.com]

Right now the slashdot effect is more effective than any adblock extension :-)

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:AdBlock Block... Blocks The Page!

[ozmanjusri]

I use ABP to get rid of ads, not to get rid of "slander". Why does ABP block a site just because it is critical of ABP?

Because the guy who wrote the site coded it that way. http://dannycarlton.com/AD_Tools/ABPfence.php. He offers tools to block anyone running ABP from any site.

He's had a long-running feud with the Adblock team https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/discussio ns/comments.php?DiscussionID=3060&page=3.

"So now, it's war. As they attempt to create "work arounds" for my blocks, I work on more comprehensive blocks that will defeat their work arounds. I also am informing other how to block people using the plug-in. The people who wrote the plug-in aren't terribly clever; thieves rarely are. But now they've inspired me, via their arrogance, to make sure a method for defeating their plug-in can be developed and distributed." --> Danny Carlton (http://jacklewis.net/weblog/, posted July 27, 2007)

"Their" claims

[gaijin99]

Actually its not "their" claims, but "his" claims, the whole thing is just one crazy person. Bear in mind that the, um, individual, behind this is a complete loony toon of the extreme right wing religious nut variety. Seriously, check out his other stuff at jacklewis.net, unfortunately you can't read his insane ratings with Firefox, which is a shame because they're quite amusing.

Given his nuthood I'd assume that he *thinks* that Firefox users are less likely to buy things online, and that somehow in the broken fragments of his mind that becomes transmuted into "demographs show that...." Pleanty of other nutbags do the same thing, why shouldn't he?

Re:Then screw them....

[efity]

Actually, it does show in Firefox... normally. Ironically, Adblock Plus blocks the entire page. It registers as a blocked filter under whyfirefoxisblocked.com#body, which is the entire page, making a nice white blankness.