Someone (yeah, I don’t know who) has developed a plug-in for Firefox called AdBlock Plus. If you have AdBlock Plus installed, it blocks all advertising that is served to you on the web, including Google keywords. Holy frijoles, Batman, it blocks our ads!
So, you might think as a media buyer, I am against this sort of buffoonery.
Not so!
If a user wants to support a site that she likes, she can override AdBlock Plus and allow ads to be served to her from that site. I like etsy.com, for example. I want etsy to stay around, so they need some ad revenue. I will disable AdBlock Plus so I can see the ads on that site.
Basically, all this does to my job is force me to become a more discerning web advertising buyer. Of course, I will still look at traffic, demographics, click thru rates, etc.; but I also need to make sure content is fresh, appealing and applicable to the audience to which I want to appeal. If my target finds none of these three in a site, it’s AdBlock Plus to the rescue!
The good news is that only 17% of surfers use Firefox currently. The real chore will begin when some wiseacre ports AdBlock Plus to Internet Explorer (that’s 76% of web users!)
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