Aplus.net Blog

Although it’s been around for less than two decades, and has been in widespread usage for even less than that, it’s usually taken for granted that Internet commerce is quickly becoming the backbone of the American economy.

And yet, there are still a lot of questions about the Internet as an economic force. Business models are continuously fluctuating; consumer buying patterns are little understood and seem to vary significantly depending on still little-known factors; and online companies come and go, with many that were once great now long-forgotten.

With this in mind, some industry followers see a serious potential danger in the growing prevalence of Adblock Plus, an add-on service to the (free) Mozilla Firefox Internet browser that’s getting more and more popular. According to a recent story in the New York Times:

What happens when the advertisements are wiped clean from a Web site? There is a contented feeling similar to what happens when you watch a recorded half-hour network TV show on DVD in 22 minutes, or when a blizzard hits Times Square and for a few hours, the streets are quiet and unhurried, until the plows come to clear away all that white space.

But when a blizzard hits Times Square, the news reports will focus on the millions of dollars of business lost, not the cross-country skiing opportunities gained.

Likewise, in the larger scheme of things, Adblock Plus — while still a niche product for a niche browser — is potentially a huge development in the online world, and not because it simplifies Web sites cluttered with advertisements.

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.

The article goes on to outline some interesting implications of the software, and the danger it may pose to the Internet. Read the entire article here.

On a personal note, I’m perfectly willing to put up with a certain amount of advertising as long as it means that I get to read the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post for free, as opposed to paying for hard copy versions. Since the content is free, it seems logical that we should have to encounter some advertising.

On the other hand, pop-ads seem to be having a competition as to who can create the most annoying way to block the content of your favorite site. Some ads I’ve recently seen on Weather.com seem to actively try to drive website visitors away. So, it’s my hope that this phenomenon will, if nothing else, teach online companies to be more discriminating in their ad placement, and try to use ads that don’t offend the senses too much. That doesn’t seem like it’s asking too much, does it?

So, what do you think of whole Adblock Plus software? Feel free to sound off in the comments section, below.