A VC: The Banner Is Back

avc.blogs.com

9 points·brett··3 comments

Any company that bets on banner ads seems at-risk to me. If somebody can go get a browser plugin (AdBlock) and kill all banners with very little effort, what's to stop most users from doing that? At this point it's mostly techies who've figured out they can block ads, but it seems only a matter of time before the techies do it for their parents, friends, and coworkers. Banner ads are invasive and annoying so there's strong motivation to kill them.

"If somebody can go get a browser plugin (AdBlock) and kill all banners with very little effort, what's to stop most users from doing that?"

Inertia. First of all, most people aren't that annoyed by banner ads. Of those who are, most of them are using Internet Explorer, so they're extremely unlikely to try to install Firefox/AdBlock or find a similar solution for IE. Of the people who already use Firefox, there is a large segment that doesn't use any extensions at all.

I know of very few people who go around installing AdBlock on people's computers. These people would be a chunk of the same people who install Firefox, but even Firefox's market share isn't very large. Five percent or so of Firefox's ~20% market share isn't very much.

People who use AdBlock or are likely to in the future are a tiny segment of users.

You have to admit that banners on popular sites are much less obtrusive than they were years ago. Plus, there's always the freemium plan where users can pay for extra features and ad free browsing.

Can plugins like AdBlock stop domain hosted ads or do they just work on third party ones?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com