Web Marketing Strategy Update

Touching on some of the points I made in Blocking Ads and Stealing Commissions With FireFox, Chris Beasley’s article Why I Love Interstitials caught my eye. Chris says he’s so enamored because he sees interstitials as “more or less the only ad format that can easily and reliably foil every ad blocker.”

As he explains,

“Interstitials are full page ads that load between page views on your site. Most interstitials display for 10 seconds or so before forwarding the user onto the page they were trying to view, and almost all interstitials include a skip button if the user does not want to wait.”

Like me, Chris feels that rampant ad blocking threatens the future of content-based websites. He goes on to say,

“If you do not like the ads on a site, and you know that the site is ad supported, ethically you shouldn’t use the site if you have ad blocking installed.”

It’s a contentious view that many people think is ridiculous, but if you’ve read my previous posts on the subject, you’ll know I’m not one of them.

In putting his case as to why he feels interstitials are the answer to ad blocking, Chris says:

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.”