When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?

The New York Times ran an inter­est­ing story today about ad block­ing soft­ware for web browsers.

I’ve used vari­a­tions of ad block­ing over the last few years, in an effort to speed up my Inter­net brows­ing. After all, every ad on a web page takes time to down­load. Some ads use Flash or Java to pro­vide ani­ma­tion, and those ads can take addi­tional time for a browser to down­load, process and present.

AdBlock Plus, which is dis­cussed in the Times, is one of the eas­ier tools to use, but it only works in Fire­fox, my favorite web browser.

Updated 8 Sep­tem­ber 2007: AdBlock Plus sup­ports sev­eral third-party lists of domain names – see this page for details. Sub­scrib­ing to a list such as EasyList or EasyEle­ment is a quick way to set up a com­pre­hen­sive ad block­ing sys­tem in Firefox.

There are other tools avail­able for Inter­net Explorer, but I won’t dis­cuss them here.

In the past, I’ve used a more com­pre­hen­sive approach that blocks ads from appear­ing on a com­puter or a net­work. This method uses a hosts file, as described in this Life­hacker post and in this page, to block well-known ad servers, based on their domain names. This isn’t a good idea unless you own your com­puter and you under­stand what you’re doing. I wouldn’t do this on a cor­po­rate or pub­lic computer.

Updated 8 Sep­tem­ber 2007: Yoyo.org has a page with detailed infor­ma­tion about ad block­ing at the router and com­puter level.

It’s also pos­si­ble to do this with an OpenDNS account. Just add the domains that the router or your com­puter should block. I men­tioned OpenDNS on July 13.

Ad block­ing is easy to do

For both the hosts and DNS meth­ods, the strat­egy is sim­ple. I’m try­ing to stop my router or com­puter from look­ing up the ad servers, thus block­ing the ads them­selves. Usu­ally I’ll see a blank space or a 404 (file not found) mes­sage in place of the ad. In the exam­ple below, OpenDNS has blocked an ad server before my browser could open the ad.

Some of my read­ers may have noticed that I do include Google Ads on this web site. The Google Ads are located at the bot­tom of each page, and Google tries to select appro­pri­ate ads based on my site’s content.

Last week, I also added some dynamic ads from Amazon.com that show prices for my courses’ text­books. Here’s an example.

I’m host­ing these ads to see how the sys­tems work before I include ads on some of my cus­tomers’ web sites. I do receive a small amount of cash if any­one clicks on the ads, some­where between 5¢ and US$1, so this really isn’t a rev­enue stream for me.

Updated 8 Sep­tem­ber 2007: To my cha­grin, I noticed that the default set­tings in AdBlock Plus will block my Ama­zon ads. It’s easy to fix this by deac­ti­vat­ing or remov­ing the entry for rcm.amazon.com.

But ad block­ing can affect the rev­enue streams of some web sites, espe­cially if a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of users are block­ing ads. A few small web sites are throw­ing the baby out with the bath­wa­ter by block­ing Fire­fox users, usu­ally redi­rect­ing them to whyfirefoxisblocked.com, based on the ridicu­lous assump­tion that every Fire­fox user has also installed and is using AdBlock.

This kind of fil­ter­ing by a web server isn’t an inva­sion of pri­vacy. It’s triv­ial work for a web server to deter­mine the kind of browser that a user is run­ning, because the browser itself includes that infor­ma­tion when­ever it requests a file from a web server.

Block­ing Fire­fox is not an option for larger web sites

While Inter­net Explorer still holds the most mar­ket share, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of users, includ­ing myself, usu­ally use Fire­fox for their web brows­ing. No sane adver­tiser wants to block users who are smart enough to install and run an alter­na­tive browser, as smart users might have more dis­pos­able income or more influ­ence on their com­pany spending.

There are some ways to cir­cum­vent ad block­ing. Most ads come from third-party web servers. Web­mas­ters can choose to server the ads them­selves. Any­one who wants to see the site will have to see the ads, because these users won’t want to block the web site itself.

As the Times men­tions, Microsoft itself is caught in the mid­dle of this prob­lem. Microsoft doesn’t include ad block­ing soft­ware in Inter­net Explorer, but the com­pany hasn’t pre­vented users from load­ing that soft­ware, either. But Microsoft also has a sig­nif­i­cant rev­enue stream from ads that its MSN sells.

Tagged as: advertising, Amazon, cloud, DNS, Firefox, Google, Internet, Internet-Explorer, Microsoft, opendns, privacy, revenue, server, value-chain