The napsterization of Ad-busting applications
July 18th, 2008 by udayanUntil recently people could not do much about avoiding ads other than flipping channels (and see another ad), use a DVR to fast forward the commercials or make use of pop-up blockers to get some temporary relief. But you couldn’t make the ads go away. They just keep coming. But a revolution might be on the cards.
Of the hundreds of add-ons available for Firefox, “Adblockers”are the most popular. For e.g. Adblock Plus has over 18 million downloads with current downloads @ 250,000 downloads/week. PC World had chosen Adblock Plus as one of the 100 best products of 2007.
And here is an interesting one: Add-Art, a Firefox add-on that replaces advertising images on web pages with art images.
It may not be long before someone creates an application that block out all TV commercials. (Remember the cancer guy who helped Jodie Foster build the time machine in the movie “Contact”? In the original book version written by Carl Sagan, the cancer guy had become rich by inventing an application that helped block all TV commercials.)
That was fiction. But how much time do we have before someone does that for real ?
July 26th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Yeah, I think the folks who produce TV commercials are starting to be more perceptive to this shift in viewing behaviour, which is why we’re going to see more and more in-movie/show product placement instead – which is a bit of a shame. Movies like ‘Transformer’s’ get away with it because the premise of it is basically one big commercial anyway, but I’d hate to see serious movies like ‘Kite Runner’ etc become commercials for various products.
I don’t think most advertisers are aware of how many people block their ads online - companies like doubleclick are probably not very forthcoming with data on that. And it’s amazing to see the kind of reaction certain people give when I try to explain ‘banner blindness’.