Disruptive Innovation from Germany

Like most people, I get most of my news on the Internet these days. This means I have to contend with with a plethora of pop-up ads, banner ads, video ads - every conceivable type of annoying advertising - just to get the content I want. This is the established business model for Web-based content: the online reader gets free content, but is forced to look at ads. 

Now a young programmer in Cologne by the name of Wladimir Palant has developed some software that puts this entire model in jeopardy. Adblock filters out ads on Web sites, and so acts almost like a TiVo for the Internet, execpt that Adblock is much better than TiVo, since the blocking is contemporaneous with viewing the Web page, and Adblock is a free download. For now, Adblock only works and extension of the Firefox browser, which is probably why Microsoft hasn't yet come after Wladimir Palant.  Still, there is a great deal of anxiety about Adblock, as the New York Times reports:

The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered.

From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter.

Some Web sites have retaliated by blocking Mozilla, and some Web designers have equated using the ad-blocking software as tantamount to stealing content.  But Palant explains that the sites have only themselves to blame:

“There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren’t blocked — make sure the users don’t want to block them,” he wrote. “Don’t forget about the users. Use ads in a way that doesn’t degrade their experience.”

Comments

[Axel]

Yeah, AdBlock is incredible. The idea of blocking Mozilla via checking the environmental variable "userAgent" is rather amateurish, you only have to install another add-on called "User Agent Switcher" to outsmart the system...
http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

It works perfectly for http://jacklewis.net/weblog/

[antonymous]

I have been blocking ads and other annoyances for many, many years with Proxomitron. It's completely configurable by the user and re-writes webpages plus outbound browser communication on the fly.

Adblock is only the latest in a long chain of imitators, but Proxomitron is still the original and most capable one.

[Lara]

They block me, because I use Adblock? So, what? If a site doesnt't work, or if they want to compel me to switch on Java Script, I just click on the next link and I'm gone. Probably forever. I never had the feeling that the internet is running out of sites I could read...