Wednesday, September 5. 2007Google Profiting from IE Users' Ignorance
Who likes advertisements? "Not me", I hear you say? Well that's why I installed Firefox and then installed Adblock Plus (and recommended that you should too in a previous post). A recent article brought this little known plugin into the limelight. The predominant business model in the internet world depends on revenue generated from advertisements. This means that companies earn when someone clicks on an advertisement shown on their website (you must have seen the 'Ads by Google' box on many websites). Most search engines earn by showing targeted advertisements alongside your search results in the hope that you will find the advertisement interesting enough to click on it (look for the 'Sponsored links' bar to the right of your search results). In both cases, the advertisement provider charges the company whose advertisement is shown, and when the advertisement is shown on a website, passes a part of the cost to the owner of the website. You can read more about Google Adsense and Adwords here. Google raked up USD 10.4 billion in FY 2006 and has earned USD 7.4 in Q1+Q2 2007 only from advertising (source).
With so much at stake, Adblock poses a potential problem and though people are not shouting from the tops of Manhattan buildings about it, it gets popular by the day. Some cheeky person started a website 'WhyFirefoxisBlocked.com' to encourage people to block Firefox users from visiting their site and even provided a script to automate this. The online community got back by creating a parody site 'WhyisFirefoxBlocked.com'. Getting back to the point, Google (and many other companies for that matter) stands to lose a lot if Adblock Plus gets popular. But, lets face it - the average Joe internet user does not even know that Firefox exists, let alone Adblock Plus. Heck, there are numerous tools for blocking advertisements directly in Internet Explorer. But, no one seems to be interested in using them. Like television, people are dulled into believing that advertisements are a part of the Internet and nothing can be done about it. Personally, I don't mind Google's style of advertisements and even if Adblock Plus would let these through, I'll view them gladly, even click on some if the text is appealing. But it's those flashing banners that declare that I've won 10000 bucks and the laughing monkey that I have to punch to claim my bonus prize that drive me nuts - and no I will never use the next generation of smileys - I don't even chat. While I'm at it, I'd also like to tell Yahoo Mail to take a crash course in subtlety - the huge banners really annoy me (of course, I haven't seen them since a long time ;). What do you think? Should ad-blocking tools be allowed? Leave a comment to let us know. Trackbacks
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didnt know IE would support tools that block ads. some of those are downloads rather than add-ons (firefox jargon).
anyways, also consider the numerous people who cannot install software on their work pc's (remember the good ol EVS days of installing winamp)?
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