Thursday, December 30, 2004

Adblock: A firefox extension WHICH WILL KILL REVENUES ON INTERNET

You must be knowing about Mozilla Firefox, blazing fast new open source Web Browser. The real power of firefox is in the way it has been created. it allows anybody to write some piece of code which will have some functionality (popularly known as extensions).

One such popular and widely used extension is Adblock. After u install it, it will identify possible items on a web pages (like a flash movie, a banner) which are potential canditate of being an ad. You can then decide either to block it or leave it as it is. You can block anything that appears on the webpage ranging from an image to an iFrame. Amazing isn't. You just block hefty little flash files etc.. and your pages would start loading faster.

But it was only side of the story. There is a flip side to it. It is just killing ad revenues on internet. If you are smart enough to block the image/ifram properly you will not get ad from that link again. Now the ad companies will loose a lot of money for sure. Now web sites are smart enough to have ads from several links. But if you visit a site often like mail.yahoo.com within a few days you will be able to block most of the annoying ads that appear on top of the messages etc.. and slow down the actual downloading of the message.

Take case of google ad sense. all google adsense is done via Iframes which have the address http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com in the beginning. In order to blcok google ads from disturbing you, u just need to block the ifram http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/* which will block all good ads. Huge loss to google.. A large chunk of profit to google comes from google adsense itself..


The lesson to be learnt is that things like Adblocks cannot be avoided. And firefox is gaining popularity like anything and it is all set to become the most popular browser on earth. So ad agencies will loose money for sure. They need to come up with some new stategies for ads. May be have multiple domain names and change then regularly.. i don know..
Is google listening!!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Now, shouldn't that make page load slower?

Thu Dec 30, 01:44:00 pm 2004  
Blogger A said...

Let us see how a webpage is displayed in firefox!

Every page has some static html text, some images, some outside links (like a flash ad) and may be some dynamic content. So first the static content is download. Then the browser will see that the webpage also contains links of some images,iframes,flash etc.. so the browser will then try to download them for you.

But if you have adblock enabled then before browser requests images/iframes/flash for download to the ad server adblock will filter out the links that you have blocked and browser will not sent request for those and display only allowed content.

Like mail.yahoo.com. Whenever you login to your account it shows a page which on the right side contains an ad which is generally a flash/image which can be from one of many ad agencies which use yahoo for ads. If you have blocked some ad server and the image/flash is from that server, adblock will not allow request for that image/flash be sent and hence you will see faster loading of the page..

IF you consider display of an email in yahoo. A typical view has some ad on the top of the page. so the ad will load first and then the dynamic content(text of the email message etc..) will load after the ad has been loaded. so if you have blocked the ad then that ad will not be downloaded and you will see your email message appearing faster!!

Fri Dec 31, 12:14:00 am 2004  

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