Browser makers warned against ad-blocking

Found on ZD Net on Wednesday, 22 June 2005
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The end of free Internet content will come when Web browsers start blocking online advertisements by default, a DoubleClick executive has warned.

Bennie Smith, the online advertising network's privacy chief, told ZDNet Australia the popularity of tools like Adblock -- an extension to the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which makes blocking online ads simple was tied to "a negative vibe against advertising in general".

He said if a similar tool could be produced for newspapers, it would not be accepted by consumers.

"You'd go to your local corner shop and buy the daily paper, and you'd have these large holes where the ads were."

Part of the Internet's value proposition lies in the provision of large amounts of free content. "But that content is not without cost. And that cost is my eyeballs seeing an ad on a page. Or within an e-mail, or next to my search results, or however it's going to come," Smith explained.

"In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.

He has to be kidding. At first, advertisers piss users off by bombing them with multiple popups/unders, blinking gifs, talking Flash-ads and content hijacking (with IntelliTxt, TopText, Surf+ and so on); and I'm only talking about legal ads, not spam. Now he complains that people take action against that? What a joke. And what's up with his newspaper analogy? I'd be happy with an ad-free newspaper (and why should they leave empty blocks in there?). He also forgets a quite important rule of the open market: if something is too expensive, I won't buy it.