Firefox and software developer Wladimir Palant are offering AdBlock Plus, a free add-on to the popular browser that blocks most display ads. The technology uses a simple filtering system to block the IP addresses that host advertising content. When I tested it out, the standard filter that came with the plug-in probably blocked 80% of the ads I would normally see. In fact, AdBlock Plus was so effective that I had to rely on publisher's own demarcations of "advertising content" to differentiate white space on the page from missing ads.
This is a serious challenge to the online advertising industry of Tivo proportions.
As Noam Cohen of the New York Times writes: "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".
While the project has so far been ignored by large publishers like Google and Yahoo, some smaller sites have responded by blocking the Firefox browser. But with 2.5 million users worldwide and 300-400,000 new users a month, this won't last long.
Unlike the early days of Napster (and you already hear the same accusations of users "stealing content" on the AdBlock blog), I think the initial response of publishers will be to counter with technology, not lawsuits. In the short term, I see a technology arms race taking off, where publishers look to outwit the filters by, for example, hosting third-party ads on their own sites. But the open source nature of AdBlock Plus means that users will counter with increasingly sophisticated workarounds to each new technological response.
In the long term, I think ad-blocking technologies will make the value of high quality branded entertainment content more important than ever. The challenge will be to bring visitors to interesting and immersive sites - the kinds we often feature on ThreeMinds - without an easy way to attract them there in the first place.
Read more from the New York Times here.
Misha Cornes