By Tom Ryan
Described by some as a "TiVo for the Web," Adblock Plus lets users delete banner ads and disable flash and rich-media messages.
The software, which was recently added to and is only accessible on the Firefox browser, is designed to make web browsing a purer user experience.
Writing for The New York Times, Noam Cohen waxed over his Adblock experience, "What happens when the advertisements are wiped clean from a website? 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 Mr. Cohen noted that, just like a blizzard, the focus afterwards is often on the millions of dollars lost in the process.
"The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model," writes Mr. Cohen. "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."
Some see legal fights if ad-blockers increasingly make ad-free surfing easier.
"We don't want to go down a route that would seem adversarial at all," Mike Zaneis, VP of public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the lobbying arm for the online ad industry, told CNET News. "People are free to ignore ads, and they often do that, but when you have a third party blocking those ads, that's the real problem."
Nonetheless, marketers speaking to Adweek mostly shrugged off the Adblock threat. They argued that it's on a niche browser, and similar programs on larger browsers have not waylaid the online advertising business model.
"This particular program is just one part of a larger trend that's a fact of life for marketers," said Ilya Vedrashko, an emerging-media strategist at Hill Holiday, Boston. Mr. Vedrashko said much bigger browsers such as Internet Explorer also have ad blocking tools. "I wouldn't overestimate the importance of the business impact of this application."
Furthermore, Mr. Vedrashko feels such technology is positive because it forces marketers to create better ads.
John Paulson, president at digital marketing agency G2 Interactive, New York, agreed. "From an industry standpoint, I don't think any of this is stuff we should be afraid of because it just puts the onus on the image creators to put out messages of value to the user," he said.
But Jenny Howell, manager of interactive marketing for American Honda Motor, was less hopeful: "Although penetration of Adblock is still quite low, conceptually, programs like Adblock are, of course, frightening to an online marketer."
Discussion Questions: Should the emergence of Adblock Plus and other internet ad-blockers make companies rethink their online advertising spending strategies? Does this change your perception of the potential of online ad spending?