If your company depends on online advertising in any way — either to produce revenue or to market products/services, beware of ad-blocking technologies in next-generation browsers. Firefox 3 offers its AdBlock Plus extension that doesn’t just kill off annoying pop-ups, but strips out all ads on a page. (Hmph! Users of AdBlock Plus don’t want to pay for their content themselves and want to disallow the ads that do pay for it.) However, Don Marti on LinuxWorld has noted that the Microsoft IE8 team is working on a feature that aims to improve privacy, but also hurts Web advertisers.
The feature, called inPrivate Browsing, stops the kind of browser/tracking snooping that tells online tracking applications things like which sites you visited before landing on the current page and which links you clicked on while hopping from site to site.
Media companies (like Network World) are obviously consumers of this data. It allows them to see which news stories are most popular and how their readers find their sites. Since Microsoft is a media company with MSN, and wants to be at least as big an online advertising player as Google, we can only assume that it will offer online advertisers some kind of workaround that doesn’t compromise its privacy promises to IE8 users.
Funny aside: (while researching this blog we attempted to view MSN.com with Firefox 3 but couldn’t. Three tries, three times it crashed Firefox 3. IE7, however, had no problem visiting the MSN site).
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