By now everyone has heard of AdBlock Plus, a small tool that effectively disables advertisements from loading within a web browser. Slowly but surely this FireFox addon has managed to garner over 5% of the FireFox user base and growing. While this may seem like a small percentage, it’s important to know who is being affected most.
In the past few months I have tracked a loss in total affiliate and Adsense revenue. There are a number of reasons for this and obviously Adblock Plus is not the primary reason, but it still hurts. I work very hard to create every website I own and therefore should be compensated for people using them. When I’m fighting spammers, cookie thieves, bots, etc, why should I have to worry about legit visitors cheating me?
Apparently I’m not the only one that feels this way and Wladimir Palant has addressed the issue on the Adblock Plus blog. Essentially, for the first time that I’ve noticed, Adblock Plus is suggesting an easy method for plugin users to opt-in to displaying ads on a website. However, what he is proposing takes into consideration only a small portion of websites with repeat traffic, which relatively speaking is a small portion of the internet and affiliate websphere.
Adblock Plus will then check the browsing history to see whether the user frequents this site (this could be specified for example as “visited the site on three days of the last week”) and then display a notification like the following (unless a notification for this site was already shown recently):
The majority of visitors to my websites are one time visitors, probably less than 5% return. This is in regards to my affiliate sites and not my personal blog. 
It’s not because I have a bad website, a spammy website, it’s because the user finds what they want and complete a sale. Or, the visitor searches on a specific question and then finds their answer. So, what Adblock Plus is proposing will not benefit me in the slightest and only caters to the largest of affiliate and news sites.
This post is just a child of a frustration with the direction the internet is taking. It’s an entitlement complex by users and a handful of programmers that think they should control whats being shown and published on the web. The issue is growing, becoming it’s own beast, and slowly starting to resemble Net Neutrality issues. After all, if Adblock Plus can effectively and accurately block ads, sure it’s on the radar of those that want to block other content. Filter or not, Adblock Plus has no place on the internet in it’s current form.
“I work very hard to create every website I own and therefore should be compensated…”
“It’s an entitlement complex by users…”
Doesn’t it strike you that you’re contradicting yourself here? Your statement above sounds remarkably like you have an entitlement complex of your own to me. Your “therefore” only works if people visit your sites and actually use them, rather than passing through after discovering the page didn’t contain what they were seeking – that’s not a comment on your sites; I’m sure your material is good, but a very high proportion of the pages I arrive at through search don’t contain what I need, so I move on. Should I be obliged to contribute to your annual earnings by viewing ads and having my activities further profiled and mined? In effect, if I am not using the page content and leave immediately, you suggest I should ‘pay’ for window shopping. If you believe that, try a paywall, but I don’t find that a reasonable or defensible argument.
AdBlock is a reaction against the dubious tactics of publishers and advertisers; pages that look like Bangkok’s red light district, scripts that hijack browser actions, popups on unload, iframes that follow mouse movements. Fair enough if there’s a interstitial page of the tactics should you enter, but there never, ever is. It’s not considered acceptable practice to demand a behavioural profile and history from someone browsing a bricks and mortar store, so why an online store?
I can’t understand why no one has developed a workable, semi automated micro payments system, to allow content providers to earn revenue for each page of content provided in a much more granular way than the current “paywall systems” of some news sites. Micro payments would allow a return to some transparency in the transaction between provider and user – you can see what you’re paying and have a choice whether to pay it. I’d be happy to pay for worthwhile content, while I’m not prepared to hand over my private behaviour carte blanche in exchange for (frequently dubious) content and ad presentations.
Either the industry gets its house in order, or national regulators or users (via adblock, ghostery, proxies etc) will do it for them; either way, revenues from such practices are going to drop. Hard work or not, advertising and profiling has no place on the internet in it’s current form.
I appreciate your time in communicating your argument, but I’ve not made a contradiction. You are ignoring the fact that just by ‘visiting’ a search result that bandwidth is consumed and those resources have to be paid for.
That said, I’m completely against data mining, which is why I do my best to ensure I use quality advertising mediums on my websites. Next, it’s no where near the level of places like Facebook, where this info is freely handed over. Now, I understand if you take a firm stand on privacy on the internet as a whole, in which case perhaps you need more than Adblock.
Lastly, it’s been proven time and time again, for most content people are just not willing to pay for it. And they should be obligated or felt they need to donate to a page created for the soul purpose of furthering discussion. However, with unobtrusive ads it allows the owner to recuperate some operating costs. Obviously depending on the site, it’s possible to do more than recuperate.