Advertisers got themselves into this mess with overly aggressive banner ads, flash ads, etc… with little consideration for the end user. Just because you *can* make an obnoxious flash ad that overlays the content of a page, plays music and animation, and is difficult to close – doesn’t mean you should, or the user will appreciate it.

This kind of backlash was inevitable.

Marketers can rant about this all they want but what they really should be doing is being creative with their marketing and not make enemies out of their audience.

Read it here:

http://www.blockfirefox.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/5/Default.aspx

what amendment do you think is being broken?

@David – Great point. I guess we will have to watch how big the efforts to promote these products gets to see how we need to adjust our advertising techniques.

This is true and this is something I considered when writing this article. The only thing I would point out here is that some people may be influenced by others to install ad blocking software.

The few people who have approached me about this did so in a way as to convince me to install the software. There is going to be some element of the audience who might have responded to advertising yet were influenced by others to block ads.

Adblocking does help the advertiser in a CPM situation, why pay for an impression if the reader will never even look at your ad? As for CPC, are you looking at CPC as a CPM campaign that costs less because you get “free” impressions of your ad?

Either way it is not the advertisers who are crying about adblocking it is the websites that generate income from readers having ads served to them that are doing the crying.

The only thing you are losing is audience size. If the audience doesn’t want ads anyways, then it seems that ad blocking works to your advantage by allowing you to not spend on consumers who wouldn’t buy or be influenced in the first place.

I just started selling 125×125 button ads on my site. Because these images are served from the same server as my content and content images blocking them will also result in blocking my content. I would like to think my visitors come to my site for my content so I do not think they will block my image directory just to avoid a few small button ads.

Because I sell these via direct sales I do not have to worry about some third party putting an annoying flash ad into my banner roation or on my site at all. Due to recent things Google has been doing I am finding them to be a very unreliable service in regards to AdSense.

I also use Pay-Per-Post but most of the offers listed on the site are either outside of the area of my readers interest or do not pay enough.

The great thing about advertising is that it’s a self regulating entity. If users don’t like specific types of ads they can either not click on the link or not visit the site where the ad is displayed.

I agree that publishers and advertisers should experiment with their ad designs to best fit the users’ desires.

Most ad blocking software doesn’t take into account the quality of ads, but rather blocks all ads of a certain type (Flash for example).

If an advertiser has a poorly performing ad or if a publisher includes ads which overly detract from the quality of their site, then market forces will dictate that the ad or site will change or perish.

Circumventing advertising for the sake of circumventing advertising is a little different than arguing over the quality of specific ads or sites.

My other point is that publishers will find a way to monetize their sites one way or the other, and in an environment where obvious forms of advertising are blocked publishers may elect to use less obvious forms of advertising which may not be beneficial to the web (i.e. pay per post).

If people generally dislike this particular form of advertising, why not listen to them?

I agree Adsense is one of the easiest forms to block; however, Adsense clones designed in HTML would be harder to block. The point I was trying to make was that text based ads would be one strategy to avoid ad blocking software. Adsense specifically would not be a good option if this were your goal.

Thanks,
David