Web advertisters/affiliates and Firefox

[rcjordan]

Luckily, JohnQ isn't likely to adopt it ...and if he does he'll run it straight out of the box. But if he should ever happen to get his hands on the extensions, your ads other than text ads are history. If you cater to a tech/geek market, you may already be feeling the fringe of the coming impact (sites I visit routinely certainly have). Firefox goes way beyond pop-up blocking, and strips cookies, images, flash, banners, tiles easily.

I've been reviewing v.9.x for the past few days (we're switching the company to it for security) and have dug fairly deeply into the extensions available as well as the onboard cookie manager and image manager. In less than a minute I can now PERMANENTLY strip an ad-heavy site like MSNBC or this forum (sorry, Danny) down to something even more minimalist than the usual 'printer-friendly' version of a page and selectively approve or deny cookies/images as well (while retaining the site's intended layout and design). Likewise, I can wipe out an ad-serving network like doubleclick, burst, or adsense GLOBALLY, never to be seen again no matter where I surf.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Whoa, thanks for sharing. There are so many threats to affiliate cookies and online advertising and Firefox is another I had not thought of.

I just started using Firefox for security since that last IE trojan. I had not experimented with any extensions other than adding the Google Toolbar. Sounds like it could even be worse than Norton IS at ad stripping.

The affiliate industry just REALLY needs to come up with another way to track besides cookies. There are way too many cookie monsters out there and it's going to get worse.

Linda

[bluecorn]

what's the panic?

it's the affiliate model that needs to evolve.

pretty much, the only score is when you send a click that converts, and usually conversion *should* also be taking the user out of cookie id into some kind of more substantial "sale" or "member" database id.

affiliates need to devise the technical way for that conversion to become recorded and recognizable to the affiliate, without the merchant actually sharing the user id info of course

with such a protocol, affiliates will favor merchants who adopt this kind of standard, merchants will get on board, and life goes on - affiliates are too valuable to lose.

cookies are a primitive thing, useful for a session at most, let's see them mostly gone.

and nobody loves junk