Ad blocking turns ugly
Not long after Adblock Plus hit the scene, one publisher struck back at users, accusing them of theft and denying access to his sites via Firefox.
Danny Carlton, who publishes about 50 websites and monetizes his traffic with Google's AdSense, says he blocked Firefox to force larger publishers and ad servers to take note.
"I know it's seen as overkill, but sometime overkill is necessary to expose something that is a growing threat," Carlton says.
While Carlton believes the larger internet companies will eventually take decisive action, he worries that smaller publishers will perish in the meantime. Few publishers have taken the extreme step of blocking Firefox (Carlton claims he's the only one, but in truth there's no way to verify that assertion).
Not long after Carlton blocked Firefox, a Techdirt post labeled the response "stupid."
One well-known blogger, Markos Moulitsas, the "Kos" in DailyKos, has created a voluntary subscription to his popular political blog.
"We won't stop you from using ad blocking software, but if you do use it we ask you to support Daily Kos another way: by purchasing a site subscription," Moulitsas wrote on his blog.
While Moulitsas says he doesn't see ad blocking as a "do something or die" problem for publishers, he does admit that users viewing his site without contributing something to the bottom line "pisses me off."
"I'm confident that if Daily Kos was in that much trouble, the community would respond to help it out," Moulitsas says. "But the site is so far from that point, that I doubt it'll ever be an issue."
A way out of the ad blocking maze?
While some publishers have accused users who employ Adblock Plus of stealing their content, Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the real concern isn't legal as much as it's communal.
"Some people will always block ads," von Lohmann explains. "But at the end of the day, this problem exists because people find a lot of ads annoying. If marketers want to solve this problem, they will have to find ways to make more compelling, relevant ads."
Robert Tas, CEO of Active Athlete Media, an ad network for niche publishers focusing on lifestyle sports, echoes von Lohmann's assessment, explaining that respect for the space should be of paramount importance to marketers.
According to Tas, Active Athlete, which hasn't heard any ad blocking complaints from its publishers, has made respect a key component of its business model by thinking like its users.
"We are the audience, so we get the importance of [respecting the space]," Tas says.
Wladimir Palant, the man who started the controversy by inventing Adblock Plus, also sees the issue as one of respect.
"There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren't blocked -- make sure the users don't want to block them," Palant wrote on his blog. "Don't forget about the users. Use ads in a way that doesn't degrade their experience."
Editors note: Mozilla, which administers the open source Firefox browser, did not return emails seeking comment for this article.
Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.