The Daily Cow

NoScript, Adblock and Adblock Plus (the most popular plug-in for Mozilla Firefox) have been downloaded a combined total of over 55 million times from the Mozilla Firefox plug-in directory, and that isn't even counting the downloads from their independent sites and other tools that may be used to block ads such as Web Developer Toolbar! That means somewhere between 30 and 70% of all Firefox users use an ad-blocking plug-in.

Considering that Firefox had a market share of 18.41% in May, and that number has surely gone up with the successful release of Firefox 3, the 30-70% range is significant. With the estimate that Firefox now has a market share of 25%, which is not unreasonable because it had 28% market share in Europe before the end of 2007, we calculate that 7.5% to 17.5% of the world's Internet users use an ad-blocking plug-in.

Now let's consider a big example--Google. If you recall, the default search engine on Firefox is Google, and if you would agree that Firefox users are more likely to be Googlers than Internet Explorer users are, you would realize that a market share of 30% on Google is not inconceivable for Firefox users. With those numbers, that means 9% to 21% of the world's Internet users use an ad-blocking plug-in.

Here's the funny part: Adblock Plus with its default configuration does not block Google ads on Google. You would have to tweak the filters considerably in order to block the ads on Google. Considering the fact that Google is expected to earn 20 billion dollars in revenue in 2008, a loss of 9-21% in revenue is considerable--that's the equivalent of a number between 1.8 billion and 4.2 billion dollars.

Incredible.

Does that make you wonder whether Google, which strongly advocates for the adoption of Firefox (it even pays publishers a dollar for each Firefox user they refer--with the Google toolbar installed, of course), had any say in whether Adblock Plus would come installed with a filter that works for the ads that are displayed beside your search results?

Maybe, just maybe.

Meanwhile, these plug-ins are making it impossible for my ads on OriginXT to cover even half of the server fees. So Google has the extra 2-4 billion dollar windfall while I struggle to pay my bills. I guess this is how big business works.