Digital Think Tank

I have just started using the Adblock extension for Firefox and I find it absolutely excellent. It is extremely easy to use and enables the user to filter out web advertisements such as banners, flash animations, buttons, etc. One of the most useful features is wildcard filtering, which makes it possible to block anything from a particular site. In other words, the user may block all images from DoubleClick and the page appears without a single banner. Pages load faster and are much more esthetically pleasing.

What I’m interested in is how content providers that rely on advertising as a source of revenue are going to handle this. Firefox boasts over 25 million users and it is only a matter of time before the use of Adblock is widespread. The total downloads for the extension are currently 1.2 millon, with 102000 downloads this week alone. If so many users are filtering out blocking ads, the content provider may end up losing revenue. Not in the sense that users will click on fewer ads - click-through rates are already very low - but in the sense that advertizers may be push prices down, based on the availability of this technology. If all ads on a given page can be filtered by a few clicks, never to be seen again (once all images from a given server are blocked, they are blocked from all sites), the investments in internet ads are suddenly much less profitable.

In fact, this affects not only content providers but virtually all internet sites that use advertizing. It will be quite interesting to see whether this changes the face of the Internet. For my part, I’m reading ad-free newspaper sites and they look great.