The rise of Firefox and the fall of Adsense
Google might need to start thinking about a new way to deliver ad content to Adsense affiliates. I’ve noticed a constant decline in my Adsense revenue over the last few months, and I have a feeling this is due to the adoption of Mozilla Firefox. I love Firefox personally, and use it as my everyday browser. However, I’ve noticed that you can install two methods to avoid advertisements. This includes Google Adsense text ads, which I find to be unobtrusive. If this is in fact the reason why my Adsense revenue is experiencing a steady decline, Google is going to start losing advertisers. This effect would take years since Google is so hot at the moment. However, ad delivery is the core money maker for Google.
Adblocking has had an adverse effect on a number of web sites, and needs to be used with caution. I’m a fan of blocking malicious ads and animated banner ads, but blocking Adsense is a little extreme. Nevertheless, most adblockers filter out <iframe> tags, which is how Google currently delivers advertisements. It’s possible that RSS ad delivery could be the wave of the future, or even open_base_dir PHP includes.
All I know is at the moment, this is a potential problem that must be addressed, both by webmasters and Google Adsense employees.
18 comments
Another possible reason why your AdSense income has decreased over time might be because AdSense isn’t as “new” or “interesting” as it may have been in the beginning — now they’re just ads and are as such visually filtered out just like banners are.
I happened to have to written an article supporting Firefox’s adblock on the same day you wrote this one. Firefox actually gives the user the ability to decide what to block, as opposed to something else like Norton Adblocker which makes those decisions for you. If we have to live with adblockers, I’ll take Firefox’s over the others.
I think the more scarier notion is a media company like CBS or Disney buying out an adblocking software like Norton, and deciding what content we see and don’t see. That’s when guys like you and I get worried.
Revenue decline could be associated with a bunch of factors, including the tiredness of the reader, as Tomas Jogin mentioned above. Did you look at your pageview numbers? And if you did, did you compare them to the ad impressions for AdSense? What percentage of pages were shown without ads? Did the number of non-ad pageviews increase over time?
Also, from the recent articles on NYT and News.com it looks like click fraud is rampant with AdSense, and hence many advertisers do not see the same ROI on their ads as before, so they choose to either pull the campaign, or bid lower amounts.
Yes, it’s entirely possible that what I observed was due to any of the factors you mentioned. I was just throwing it out there into public space that it’s possible that a rise in Firefox market share could correlate with a drop in Adsense. Interestinly, I did observe an increase in revenue in the past month, but I think this was due to an increase in pageviews. I’ll have to take a look at the data more carefully before I really know what’s going on.
Something to consider is the actual mechanism behind AdSense and Firefox’s ad blocking software: Firefox blocks pop-up windows and (with the right plugin) images from ad servers. On the other hand, Google’s AdSense ads are primarily in-lined text — no popups to block, no images to block.
A more likely theory would be that people are mentally blocking the AdSense ads because they don’t attract the eye with flashy (and annoying) animation and/or blinking. It may also be the case that people just aren’t clicking on ads anymore, regardless of how tasteful the presentation.
It should be added the presentation of a website is protected by copyright law. The design, graphics, layout and yes also ads. INAL but any modification by others of the presentation of ones own site should be considered a serious violation.
I just added adsense block. thanks for the heads up. now nobody can profit from wasting my time on their website.
First off, the Adblock extention doesn’t simply hide the iframe (that’s how it would work for flash ads), what is does is it seeks out the google ads javascript file and doesn’t allow the browser to run the script, hense the ads are never even called.
Adblock doesn’t do this by default of course. From what I remember it comes with a clean slate. The problem is there is this dude who everybody downloads filters from. The problems wit the filters right now are:
From what I’ve seen, only one guy is writting them and he seems to be basically holding all the cards.
The way that he blocks the ads is using a filter which consists of complex regular expression text, etc. This means that the average user can’t easily enable only google ads unless he know exactly what he’s doing.
Where are the Google ads you’re talking about? I don’t see any …
Regarding that post about copyright, I would think that a user modifying the page layout is perfectly within protection under the fair use clause.
What ads? I don’t see any.
Even easier – Use the Filterset.G auto-updater for adblock!
Firefox is hardly the cause – just a few hours ago I was looking at the adblock extension for firefox. I posted a message below the download point for the filter The message said: what I found was this. The updater module for adblock is designed to keep open google adsense and yahoo equivalent, while allowing for all other adverts to be blocked. If you take out the “whitelist rules” updater puts them back in, if you switch the rule off without deleting, adsense updates with a mozilla url which I believe (havent looked yet) may be a redirector so that adsense flows that way through your browser, my advice to anyone who wants to block adsense is that they should take out the updater and use the adblock by itself. To be honest with you, adsense is nothing but spam that wastes my bandwidth and time. If your revenues are going down its probably due to the fact that 1 in 4 adverts leads to a site that infects you with spyware and no-one is taking that risk anymore.. over this weekend I spent a total of 12 hours cleaning out the all the malware from my home client-server network of 4 computers. It seems unreasonable that your get rich quick scheme is the source of my network problems and as such I post wherever apllicable the exact methodology to block this form of surf-junk
FORGOT TO SAY I believe that text adverts are the way forward and if you advertisers were to start politicising the argument for taking down the companies who are using the gullability of children and people who just about have enough computer literacy to click a link, then we might have some idea of the reason for adsense. Start with the sites who give away free screensavers, ringtones, all that cool junk kids want that contain malware. then you might get somewhere. I notice no-one out there on the net saying our revenues are going down – you blame the tools – firefox – its not the tools its the quality of the material the tools work with thats shoddy. Its the advertisers themselves that are taking the P***. Some of them have scrupils that are being defeated by people who dont give a **** about where the money comes from.
PRESS THE FART BUTTON – YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO
Maybe next weekend you can take your kids to the park instead. They’d like that. ;)
I write a lot of web technical content that people seem to find useful, and I think it’s fair and reasonable to have a few unobtrusive ads on the right side of the page. The fact that some people click the ads for products related to the content means some of them find the ads useful. It’s nice to make a few bucks to cover costs and (to a very small extent) my time. If I can’t get that return, I’ll certainly write a lot less for the web and spend more time writing for my day job at a big evil corporation. My point: advertising is not inherently evil, and without products like AdSense to “monetize” pages, a lot less people would be putting otherwise free content out there. But I guess that perspective doesn’t play very well out there on the collective farm. ;)
I personally think it should be against some sort of copyright law to block the ads from a site.
The ads are, in essence, the price you pay to get in the door to a website. Taking away this small fee (paid for by advertisers, not users!) negates part of the reason a person posted a site, and will ultimately lead to less free content on the web.
Let’s face it: the reason why I (and millions others) use AdBlock Plus is not the Google ads. They are the “good ones”, i.e. ads that don’t disturb too much.
The reason are are all these blinking, flashing, .. well let’s say it: annoying banner ads, that all too often even make it next to impossible to read what is written on the web page.
Well, now that I do have this ad filter installed, of course I want it to block the other ads, too. No need to download stuff I already know I am not interested in.
Those of you who call for regulations on this. Keep in mind: it is MY screen, and MY Internet connection. That means it’s ME who decides what get’s downloaded, and what gets displayed. If you don’t like that, fine, block your content to everybody who have AdBlock installed. But mind you: it won’t help your revenues. It will just drop you out of many link lists.
Instead, you should rather send a big “Thank You” to all these advertisers who tried too hard to get the user’s attention. It’s because of them that the AdBlocker actually got so widespread. And guess who has to pay!