From Wladimir Palant (AdsensePlus’ developer)’s blog:
Do you think there will be technological solutions to prevent Adblock Plus from working?
I doubt anything can make Adblock Plus entirely unusable. However, Adblock Plus has a very distinct technological limit. Blocking every single ad on the Internet requires too much effort — which is why I think that over time we will reach a balance where only the annoying advertisements will be blocked by filter lists like EasyList. The others would “survive” because nobody will bother blocking them. Which is a good thing, we need something to discourage advertisers from using annoying ads.
I agree completely (the whole post linked to above is interesting), and I hope that this is the eventual result of Ad-blocking extensions. Unobtrusive, non annoying ads should survive. I think they will.
Annoying “push the button/kill the samurai/look at me I’m floating across the screen over the content” ads should die a swift and un-mourned death. At least, if you asked me about it.
Also… due to thinking about this for the last day, I decided that I did want to install Adblock plus. I white-listed Google Ads and The Deck, because I want to encourage that type of advertising; everything else on the EasyList(US) is blocked.
Though Google ads can be abused, too: anyone who’s seen one of those sites with a few lines of content and three HUGE blocks of Adsense getting in the way knows what I mean. Also, I’ve heard YouTube adsense ads are now available; not sure yet what I think of that; I guess I’ll know when I see some.
UPDATE: In another post, Wladimir also links to two great articles on the topic: Adblock: Adapt or Die and Adblock Doesn’t Matter: Get Over It. From the former article a great observation:
… if you are in an ad-supported content providing business, you need to learn a little bit of economic Darwinism: “Capitalism makes no guarantees whether your business model will succeed from one day to the next. Adapt or die.”
That’s the same thing I’ve been thinking: if it doesn’t work, it’s not the site visitors who need to change, it’s the business model. Imagine trying to change your customers to suit your business model… how well is that going to work? (Answer: not very.)
