The Fun Bucket

If you are a webmaster you know by now how important advertisements are in compensating bandwidth and hosting fees that you pay to keep your website alive. For all of us with non-profit sites that try to raise at least enough money to pay for our hosting fees, the constant rise in adblock users is not a good thing.

Mozilla Firefox plugins such as Adblock Plus enable internet users to block advertisements on websites, therefore limiting the page impressions on those advertisements and potentially lowering the administrator’s income. Now it doesn’t sound like it’s a big deal if just a few people are doing it, but the reality is as Mozilla Firefox migration levels continue to rise and more people download the plugin with included filters, the less and less impressions administrators will see.

Now I’m not a big fan of giant flash advertisements that take forever to load and flash all over your screen, especially the
real media advertisements that websites like IGN use that take up a full page of a website and require you to watch
them before continuing to the page they requested. Those are the kind of advertisement that should be blocked (to send a message to those who use them), along with popup ads which are also annoying.

However, small image ads and/or ads that are relevant (text) to a website’s content shouldn’t be blocked in my opinion.
Adblock Plus’s slogan reads ”Save your time and traffic”. Since most internet users, with the exception of myself, are 
now on broadband internet, you’re not saving a lot of time by blocking ads.  If the ads are text, they’ll load practically
instantly and should be useful and relevant to some users anyway.

Some websites have incorporated detection of the Firefox browser and if you are using Firefox, you get redirected to
WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com with a short message about adblocking. While I don’t agree that it’s Mozilla’s fault; they do seem to promote and allow use of the extension so the owner of that website has a point.

On the other hand, people skip commercials on television with their DVRs and a lot of people watch TV and then don’t watch
the commercials, so why should this differ? That’s another interesting viewpoint taken by iTWire.

So here’s the message to Adblock users - think about what you are doing to the webmasters that put lots of time and
effort into their websites, forums or blogs before you start blocking their ads. In the end, I believe intrustive, annoying huge flash advertisements are justified to be blocked and webmasters and users should work together to come to a conclusion. Why not show more simple, related text advertisements that don’t bug your users but will still bring in some income? Personally I have no ads on The Fun Bucket at this time and have no plans to implement them in the near future.

Other blogs that have commented on this: 1 - 2