The Firefox browser is evidence of community power in action - a bunch
of bright techies get together to launch a better competitor that
Microsoft is prepared to offer. And in taking on one of the world’s
biggest and aggressive companies, their latest market share is 10.3% - with no marketing budget to speak of.

This might not sound too much, but many serious companies would kill to
be able to carve out that much market from a MS core brand. Imagine
controlling 10% of the word-processing or spreadsheet market!

While this leaves MS with a comfortable 83.7%, there’s two underlying
trends that are important. Firstly, most of those 10.3% are almost
certainly all very influential people, whose opinions on tech will be
listened to by their peers (especially their non-techie  friends).
Secondly, Firebox has doubled its reach in the last three months.

Could Firefox have reached its tipping point and will the next version of Explorer reverse the trend?

One of the really popular aspects of Firefox (OK, apart from tabbing)
is the ability to block annoying pop-up advertising. Personally I
wouldn’t dream of giving money to companies that annoyed me this much,
but hey, some people must. It must be the same drongos who respond to
spam email.

But The Big Picture
now reports that you can go one step beyond blocking pop-ups. A
downloadable Firefox extension, Adblock, allows you to strip web pages
of all advertising material all together. This includes banners,
buttons and Google Adwords.

Adblock is now the third most popular extension and has so far been
downloaded 2.8 million times. For a product you probably haven’t heard
of (OK, you might have, but I hadn’t) that’s quite a big number. If I
did some analysis, I reckon that might make it somewhere in the league
of iPod in terms of initial rate of sale, at a guess.

For media owners that’s a hell of an issue. It means that Adblock users
have ended the tacit reader/ media owner treaty which was drafted in
the mists of time:

And it shall be declared that the media owner shall produce material
for the reader to the best of their ability and that the media owner
may subsidise all or a proportion of their costs by selling advertisers
access to those readers in the form of advertising messages.

If that Treaty is abandoned, how can the readers expect the media owner
to continue to serve them great content? But they do seem to expect
this - that’s the problem increasing faced by advertisers and media
owners alike.

That’s why advertisers and media owners must move beyond traditional
models and explore new methodologies of engaging the customer as a matter
of urgency.

Now, anyone fancy advertising on this site