Last week, Mozilla announced that they’d reached the milestone of their 1 billionth addon download. It took 3.5 years to reach this milestone and is quite an incredible feat indeed. 

If you take a look at the list of the most popular addons, ‘Adblock Plus’ tops the list with about 279,854 weekly downloads. I have been using this addon for a long time now and totally love it. It blocks all ads and any ad serving related javascript on your Firefox instance. It’s quite interesting though — that the most popular addon provides you the ability to block ads – the very sole revenue source that most of the Web 2.0 sites rely on and that drove most of the Web 2.0 mania.

What does it tell us ? 

That online advertising in its current form is simply broken. Online advertising has come to be perceived simply as a certain amount of torture, that every user should be subject to, to avail the free service that they are using. Popularity of Adblock Plus just shows that given a chance, users will tune out the advertising, no matter what.

So, how exactly can online advertising be fixed ? Of course I dont know the answer yet, else I’d have gone my way cashing out on it. 

However, one great example on how advertising can become more engaging are the amazing Apple ads on New York Times. If you havent seen these ads, I’d suggest you take a look — they’re simply amazing.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 7:52 pm and is filed under India Online Advertising. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.