Firefox Users Bad For Advertisers

rocketjam writes "According to CNET, German advertising technology company Adtech reports that during the months of October and November, Internet Explorer users were more than four times as likely to click on ads than Firefox users were. During the period 0.5 percent of IE users clicked on ads compared to 0.11 percent of Firefox users. Speculation on reasons for the difference in click rates range from Firefox's integrated pop-up blocking to seeing the average Firefox user as more tech-savvy the average Internet Explorer user."

AdBlock

[ack154]

Having something like AdBlock [mozilla.org] probably doesn't help their click % for Firefox either.

Hooray for extensions!

Re:What next?

[Karrde712]

Actually, if you look at the breakdown for insurance companies and their policies, you'll see that they give very different rates based on the car you drive, for two reasons: rate of theft, and rate of accidents statistically for those cars.

Re:most sites i go to

[jlar]

Try this one:

http://gauret.free.fr/adshare/adshare.php [gauret.free.fr]

Re:Next battlefield: Rise of inline popups?

[coolcold]

install adblock in firefox
click on adblock on bottom right
find suspicious address (usually iframe or js)
choose and click ok
bravo, say bye bye to your friend

Re:AdBlock

[plover]

Weather.com is soo last millenium. Assuming you live in America, try www.noaa.gov [noaa.gov]. They offer point forecasts (within a 5km area), no ads, and you've already paid for them via your tax dollars.

While I love the thought of using the weather underground for weather reporting (it seems like Open Source Weather Forecasting,) I haven't yet mustered up the energy required to figure a proxomitron filter to block the dozens of ads that litter their site. Until I do, the NOAA is still my first choice.

Re:AdBlock

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this time with proper formatting.

Just cut and paste the following into a text file and then import it into adblock.

[Adblock]
/\D\d{2,3}x\d{2,3}\D/
goog lesyndication
us.yimg.com/a/
/\/buy_assets\//
/ [\W\d_](top|bottom|left|right|)?banner(s|id=|\d|_) [\W\d]/
/[\W\d](double|fast)click[\W\d]/
/[\W\d] click(stream|thrutraffic|thru|xchange)[\W\d]/
/[\ W\d]value(stream|xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d]dim e(xchange|click)[\W\d]/
/[\W\d](onlineads?|ad(ban ner|click|-?flow|frame|ima?g(es?)?|_id|js|log|serv (er|e)?|stream|_string|s|trix|type|vertisements?|v |vert|xchange)?)[\W\d]/
/(hot|spy)log/
/[\W_](b( an|nr)s?|jump|redir(ect|s)?|stat)[\W_]/
/\W(cy|r) ?c(ou)?nt(er|ed)?\W/
/p(artner|ing\.cgi|romotion) /
reklama
/sp(onsor|ymagic)/
/top(100|cto)/

Re:Many adverts don't display correctly on firefox

[daveewart]

Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox [...]

In that case you aren't writing compliant code, end of discussion.

Re:AdBlock

[the unbeliever]

Ad revenue comes from both "impressions" (displaying the ad on your page, paid by unique host) and "clickthrough" (unique hosts who actually click the link)

They Should Read Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox

[DarkKnightRadick]

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041206.html

And I quote:

"Summary:
Studies of how people react to online advertisements have identified several design techniques that impact the user experience very negatively.

Advertising is an integral part of the Web user experience: people repeatedly encounter ads as they surf the Web, whether they're visiting the biggest portals, established newspapers, or tiny personal sites. Most online advertising studies have focused on how successful ads are at driving traffic to the advertiser, using simple metrics such as clickthrough rates.

Unfortunately, most studies sorely neglect the user experience of online ads. As a result, sites that accept ads know little about how the ads affect their users and the degree to which problematic advertising tricks can undermine a site's credibility. Likewise, advertisers don't know if their reputations are degraded among the vast majority of users who don't click their ads, but might well be annoyed by them.

Now, however, we have data to start addressing these questions. At my recent User Experience 2004 conference, John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay presented a large body of research on how users perceive online advertising. Here, I offer a few highlights from their presentation (my comments on their findings are solely my responsibility)."

Change the way you advertise (I prefer text ads myself, I'm 100% more likely to click on one of them then any sort of graphical ad) and you'll see more people clicking on ads.

They're very simple to create.

[Kjella]

It is simple CSS. Create a layer, give it a position:absolute, z-level higher than any other (ie. on top), and have a javascript link to hide it. The actual page would just have a
<div class=ad>
<img src=".../banner.jpg">
</div>
Even if you disable JS, the only thing you disable is the close button. I've seen pages with this, but not the ads. The ads are still caught by the image filter, but I have to close the empty css layer.

Re:A different way of advertising...

[hawkeyeMI]

If the sites hosting them use iFrames you can block the iFrames with Adblock.

Re:Next battlefield: Rise of inline popups?

[slide-rule]

I caught a pop-up layer/frame thing yesterday while looking for inflation data. (Sorry I don't have the site address now; The popup iframe was served directly to advert site registration.) Having ad-block already installed, I blocked the iframe and reloaded... I still wound up with an empty pseudo-window thing (had border, title, and "X", but no content) popping up in front of the content I was interested in, so in my mind FF1.0/Ad-block still currently fails here.

Re:AdBlock

[vrtladept]

I think the poster is on to something. BTW, adblock with filterset G http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ [geocities.com] doesn't block the google ads on the right, but does take care of all the rest. It greatly enhances my Internet experience!

Fraudlent Ad Clicking on /.

[TFGeditor]

There was a /. story on this recently http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/03/145 0243&tid=217&tid=98&tid=218 [slashdot.org]

Re:AdBlock

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh!

'Twas the sound of the joke passing you by.

Re:A different way of advertising...

[Overzeetop]

Damn, google ads are usually the only advertising worth checking out, as they're usually targetted.

Re:AdBlock

[Ishin]

I use flashblock [mozdev.org] as well as adblock. I'm not big on having talking flash advertisements sneaking up on me and when I want to view a flash I'll click on the flashplay button.

They make a great team.

Ads for sales vs. marketing

[bitingduck]

What you're describing is pretty much the difference between sales and marketing.

Sales is getting out (by whatever means) and getting people to open their wallet for you in response to your ads/pleas/whatever.

Marketing is creating an awareness, and hopefully "need" for whatever you're selling, but not trying to close the sale right there, or even in the near future. This is especially true for high dollar items like cars.

Tracking clicks is in a sense trying to track sales (usually the seller probably only gets some time from the clicker, not money, though) even though a lot of ads are clearly intended to create a marketing presence. You don't have to click on them for them to be effective-- you just have to see them (over and over) out of the corner of your eye while reading something else. Tracking views is what happens in the rest of advertising (how many people watch that show x how many times the ad appears). Eventually internet advertising will use a hybrid of clicks and views to track.

Re:AdBlock

[teedog]

For those of us not savvy enough to write our own Adblock filters, try these filters out. They are updated almost daily!

http://geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/ [geocities.com]

Detailed instructions for those who need it:
http://geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/-instructio ns.txt [geocities.com]