Take slashdot (as an example), if everyone blocks ads, how would they "adapt"? My guess would be A) they won't, or B) they'll be reduced to making paid subscriptions mandatory, and perhaps increasing the number of advertisements masqueraded as genuine stories (such as the recent Cannon printer promotion)
Or maybe they just start placing ads in an intelligent way: ads based on the content of the site (like the Google ad), and on user preferences. If you mostly get ads you are interested in, you will look at them/click them without them being intrusive. (Again, like the Google ad: its plain text, and it has about five times the clickthrough rate of normal (not context sensitive) ads.)
Consequently, Adblock is a Good Thing: it forces advertisers to choose intelligent ads instead of intrusive ads.
Let's suppose the average Firefox user spends twice the time browsing the web than the average IE user (which is probably an underestimation). Let's also suppose that they spend the same amount of clicks in a day (which means they are equal from a marketing point of view). Then, the FF user would be half as likely to click on a given ad (since his clicks are distributed over twice as many ads) than the IE user, and so a survey based on a small random sample of websites would show IE users twice as likely to click on ads.
It's impossible to tell how much the report is skewed by differences in surfing habits (which dont necessarily translate to differences in customer behavior).
Slashdot Mirror
Take slashdot (as an example), if everyone blocks ads, how would they "adapt"? My guess would be A) they won't, or B) they'll be reduced to making paid subscriptions mandatory, and perhaps increasing the number of advertisements masqueraded as genuine stories (such as the recent Cannon printer promotion)
Or maybe they just start placing ads in an intelligent way: ads based on the content of the site (like the Google ad), and on user preferences. If you mostly get ads you are interested in, you will look at them/click them without them being intrusive. (Again, like the Google ad: its plain text, and it has about five times the clickthrough rate of normal (not context sensitive) ads.)
Consequently, Adblock is a Good Thing: it forces advertisers to choose intelligent ads instead of intrusive ads.
Let's suppose the average Firefox user spends twice the time browsing the web than the average IE user (which is probably an underestimation). Let's also suppose that they spend the same amount of clicks in a day (which means they are equal from a marketing point of view). Then, the FF user would be half as likely to click on a given ad (since his clicks are distributed over twice as many ads) than the IE user, and so a survey based on a small random sample of websites would show IE users twice as likely to click on ads.
It's impossible to tell how much the report is skewed by differences in surfing habits (which dont necessarily translate to differences in customer behavior).