Posted on 06/23/2005 12:34:42 PM PDT by Uncle Fud
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".
However, only the online arena is able to easily produce and widely distribute such tools, he added.
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.
"You'd somehow feel like your 25 cents had not gotten full value," he said.
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.
If any browser manufacturer considered implementing an ad-blocking feature as a default option, Smith said they should consider their own position as a marketer [of their own products] and a publisher of content.
"They would be harming their own customer relationships to create a short-term, short-sighted, limited-effectiveness tool," he said. "One that they would probably end up having to withdraw from the market."
If enough people started blocking ads, Smith warned that publishers would start charging for content.
"In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.
Like an Editorial Page?
I despise DoubleClick and wish that the fleas of a thousand camels would infest the armpits of that executive. Popup and potentially destructive adware should be punishable by the death penalty.
Not that I have an opinion on that or anything.
...LOL...
Bet his ancestors were buggy whip makers...
I like the monkey analogy...
"In an offline world, what would happen in that case is that the 25c newspaper would cost $5," he said.
And almost no one would read it because almost no one's going to pay $5 for a newspaper. How hard is that to figure out?
I don't mind ads on pages but the pop-ups drive me nuts! I actually read some ads but never, ever pop-ups just because they make me so mad.
How many people think blocking unwanted pop-ups is a violation of freedom of speech? Show of hands?....Anyone?....Anyone at all?....
It's always nice to hear from an impartial analyst who's clearly looking out for our best interests.
To heck with Doubleclick.
I just need a way to turn Flash on and off on the fly. I already found a program which messes with the register so that Flash can be stopped, but you have to stop IE, run the program and then run IE again.
It's perfectly reasonable to advertise on the net without any of the above.
You mean your paper doesn't have a screaming monkey?
The only think comparable in print is those cards that fall out of the magazine when you flip through the pages.
I use Firefox and have buttons on my toolbar by which I can instantly switch graphics on/off and Flash on/off
No, the cost is a little file, applet, program, or script that the AD places on my computer without my knowledge or consent that tracks everything I do on the computer, steals my email address and then bombards me with spam, and hijacks my browser or worse.
Only in articles about Howard Dean.
Oh yeah, it was back when I was housebreaking my bull terrier, that would have been early 2000.
Perhaps worse, though, are those cards that are stapled in so that the card is on page 60 but it sticks out halfway onto page 40 also.
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