Archive for January, 2006
Monday, January 9th, 2006
Blocking Ads and Stealing Commissions With FireFox
After Linda Buquet picked up on my previous post, Webmasters, Could Firefox Be Bad For Your Health? and put it out for discussion on her 5 Star Affiliate Programs blog and the WebProWorld forums, I decided to write a follow-up in an attempt to address some of the issues raised in more detail.
As I mentioned on WebProWorld, Firefox is already used by somewhere between 10 and 14% of all surfers.
That’s a LOT of people.
It’s true that only a percentage of them will make use of plugins at all, but nevertheless, with Google promoting Firefox and paying Adsense publishers for every download, their number can be expected to increase rapidly. This, and the wide range of scripts makes Firefox a potentially bigger problem than Norton’s ad blocking software.
At WebProWorld, southplatte said:
“I need the content I need, when I need it and don’t have time, money or the want to have to scroll past three banner ads in the middle to two side sections and the four adsense ads that separate the paragraphs of how-tos, news or other content I am reading.”
6 Comments » - Posted in General, Affiliate Marketing, Online Advertising (Gen) by Azam
Friday, January 6th, 2006
Webmasters, Could Firefox Be Bad For Your Health?
Recently, I finally got around to looking at the scripts available for the Firefox plugin, Greasemonkey. I was not expecting what I found.
From the main site:
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.
For example, you could:
Most of the scripts are fairly innocuous and are designed to help users get more out of various websites.
But MANY are designed soley to strip ads from pages, remove redirects and even change affiliate links.
Here are some examples:
Bloglines Moreover Ad Remover
Description: Get rid of ads in moreover feeds on bloglines
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown
Ad Blocker
Description: Block advertisements
Written By: Mysteriously Unknown
