Comments on: Why Firefox is blocked dot com

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:05:56 +0000

Well, I was being facetious, but my point is really that AdBlock can be used to make most personal blogs look like serious work things. And I bet that’s what a lot of people are using it for.

By: Gary

Gary — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:04:35 +0000

Thanks, Charles. I’ll update the post.

And I’ll ignore S2’s comments about photo blocking.

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:59:45 +0000

Can I just say that the great thing about AdBlock is that it doesn’t just work on ads. You can use it to block anything. Like the photo at the top of this blog, for instance.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:47:00 +0000

the phrase “Some webmasters are apparently redirecting Firefox users..” should actually be replaced with “One webmaster is redirecting Firefox, and other non-IE users…”

It’s only the one guy, who would rattle if you shook him, there’s so many screws loose.

Hasn’t stopped this being one of the most-commented topics on the Gdn blog in the past week, even with clarification from yrs trly, though. People really hate internet ads.

By: Squander Two

Squander Two — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:26:13 +0000

You know what really pisses me off? Ads that are hosted on servers that aren’t up to the load. So an entire page takes three minutes to load just because of one little advert in the corner. That is a particularly useful use for AdBlock.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:23:55 +0000

No, I didn’t like the demo either – I only bought the game because I was incredibly bored and had some spare cash. And now I hate to think how much of my life I’ve wasted on it.

I know what you mean about GTA, but I found it connected in a way that GTA never did with me. Then again, for the first hour I thought “this sucks”, and I don’t think I’ve persevered with any GTA title for longer than that. So maybe I just didn’t give GTA a chance.

> It’s a shame that Crackdown got lost in all the halo 3 stuff.

Yeah, I wonder how many people bought it for the halo 3 demo and didn’t bother playing it.

By: mupwangle

mupwangle — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 22:40:25 +0000

I kinda noticed the animated billboard as I was trying to climb it at the time. ;-)

It’s a shame that Crackdown got lost in all the halo 3 stuff. I suppose if it hadn’t it wouldn’t have sold as much. It would’ve been written off as a GTA clone. I really didn’t get into the demo. mind you.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:40:59 +0000

I think it’s too early for it to appear in the Classics range. But you’re right, it’s a great game.

Can’t say I noticed the ads – there’s a feature in the current (or last?) Wired where eye-tracking studies etc have proved that gamers don’t notice in-game ads because they’re too busy playing the game.

By: mupwangle

mupwangle — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:33:41 +0000

Personally, I’m doing the “not looking” thing.

Noticed my first in game ad today. Dodge Nitro animated building in Crackdown. Which is ace, if you’ve not played it. (the game, not the car) (and yes, Gary, I know you’ve played it. I was meaning other people) It’s £20.83 in Tesco. Not sure why such an arbitrary figure.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:07:55 +0000

Back to my ad thoughts about this place, I’m thinking I might replace the banners over there <—- with text ads. Would that make things better for the regulars, or are you all doing the AdBlock or RSS thing anyway?

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:05:33 +0000

This was linked in the discussion, and it's good too (particularly for site owners): How ads really work: superfans and n00bs.

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:59:16 +0000

There’s a series of good posts by a metafilter user called Chundo, who puts the pro-ad point of view (he/she doesn’t like ads, but reckons that for now content sites don’t have many other options):

Quite honestly, people would be better off tolerating advertising in its current form – clearly defined and pretty easy to mentally block out. It will be a long journey from where we are to get to a point where users directly support the sites they use (via micropayments or the like), and until then advertising is here to stay. If things like AdBlock become ubiquitous, advertising won’t disappear – it will get more integrated and insidious. Look what happened with product placement in movies – can’t fast forward past all of those anymore, can we? And most content providers will hate it, but they’ll have bills to pay and users who aren’t used to paying them, so they will play along rather than close up shop.