Content Blocking With Opera

[Brett_Tabke]

It is the age old classic:

Love it as a User.
Hate it as a Webmaster.

[Hester]

I don't think we can blame Opera only for this. I wonder how many advertisers hate Firefox for its ad-blocking extensions.

I don't bother to block all ads - some of them show me interesting things - but when they are plain annoying, I can now use Opera to block them. Makes the page load faster next time too.

[netchicken1]

I used to think that adblocking software meant the end of the internet income as we know it, but have revised my opinion from those doom laden days.

Opera is about 2% of the market, Firefox 15% (depending on who you ask) that means there is still a huge and growing market out there of new users who are potential customers and reading adverts.

Anyway opera and firefox users are usually geeks who never click on adverts anyway.

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't think webmasters have yet clued in on what opera 9 can do. This blows away the firefox stuff as lame and hard to use.

I just eliminated most of the advertising on the net by visiting 5-6 websites and using the content blocker. I then added the contextual advertising urls and - presto - goodbye 95% of the advertising on the web today.

Something aint right about being able to do that.

[Hester]

Only if you're an advertiser.

[zCat]

I just installed Opera 9, and the adblocking facilities are certainly not "in your face", i.e. I was half expecting it to pop up little dialogues asking me if I wanted to block some ads etc. If it was that easy I'd be worried. But as it is I still have to find the right menu (Tools->Advanced->Blocked content - or maybe there's an easier option?); so I think you'd have to want to a) be annoyed enough by ads to want to block them; b) know that browsers offer this kind of facility; c) be bothered enough to find the right menu and muck about with the settings.

Personally most ads (apart from popups) don't bother me, at least on broadband (and it's been a while since I've used anything else), and at the moment I can't be bothered to fiddle around with yet another program and its settings... The same is certainly true of most non-technical Internet users I know.

Are there any recent methodical studies on ad-blocking behaviour?

[edited by: zCat at 2:43 pm (utc) on July 10, 2006]

[Hester]

Tools->Advanced->Blocked content - or maybe there's an easier option?

Right-click on the page.