Danny Carlton of Whyfirefoxisblocked.com has unblocked Firefox! The reason why is that he has provided a script that now detects if AdBlock Plus is running and blocks the site if it is. This will allow those websites who make money off of banners and advertisements to block only those Firefox users who are actually using the Adblock Software.

Personally I feel both sides of the argument are being idiots. Carlton wants to get ad revenue off every visitor to his site. His argument is that it “deprives online publishers of legitimate revenue and allows users to steal content on the sly.” By blocking ads on his sites, he loses that much more revenue. Saying his content is stolen though pushes it a bit for my tastes.

On the other side of the coin, some users do not want to see the ads in the first place. Their claim is that the desktop screen is their property, the hard drive space used by the ads (to cache them,) is their property, and their time and bandwidth is being wasted downloading the ads in the first place. Further claims are “it’s a good thing that such web sites die of their own weight … if their only value was the ads they carried!” when speaking about defunct web sites.

I believe that both sides are being idiots. Carlton is trying to make a mountain of a molehill that has the potential to become a mountain. But instead of fixing the problem by providing content that users want and coming up with things like subscriptions, he wants to rely on ads only to make money. There are a hundred ways he could make cash, but doesn’t do so. Instead he spends time coding scripts to block Firefox users, and then restricting it to just Adblock Plus users.

The other side is being idiots because Web 2.0 has yet to fully roll out to every site. Advertisements are a fact of life. Usually they are small enough to not be that noticeable. I like to think those on my site are. (BTW if you don’t like them, let me know.) Personally – my eyes glaze over the advertisements any more and I hardly notice them. The extra bandwidth used to isn’t that big of a deal, nor is the hard drive space used to cache them. Doubly so in days of 250+ gb hard drives.

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