No big threat to web ads

by Jenny McCune

  Talk about making a mountain out of molehill.
   Seattle-based software maker Real Networks Inc. has agreed to stop selling a program that allows users to block out ads as they surf the web. Real Networks is yielding to pressure from its customers, who see ad blockers as a threat to the future of advertising on the web.
   Their fears are entirely unfounded, as it turns out.
   Ad blockers work all right, say industry observers, but very few people bother to buy or use them.
   "None, zip, zero, zilch, nada," is how Forrester Research senior analyst Jim Nail describes the impact of ad filters on internet advertising to date.
  When first introduced several years ago, blockers were perceived as a serious potential threat to the nascent web advertising industry. This was back when the world saw the web as primarily a source of information and wasn't quite sure advertising on the web would ever catch on. Advertisers feared that consumers would march out in droves to buy the programs, killing web advertising before it got started.
   As it turns out, blockers appeal to a tiny audience of web afficionados, and most of those use them primarily to speed up the loading of pages, say Nail and others. Only a small few use them in order to avoid looking at ads.
   That's not to say that a goodly number of web users don't find the ads annoying, observes Nail. It's simply that they've come to accept advertising as the price one pays to surf the web, and they are not going to take the trouble of installing a program that knocks ads out. He notes that many people dislike unsolicited snail mail but only a fraction "take the time to sign up on the Direct Marketing Association's list to not receive junk mail."
  Ad filter developers such as WRQ Inc.,makers of AtGuard, and Internet Mute Inc., makers of interMute, dismiss these criticisms, understandably. AtGuard's marketing manager, Anne Marshall, boasts that downloads of her company's ad filter--which sells for $29.99-- have increased by five-fold since it went on sale in July 1998.
   But WRQ won't release actual sales figures, so it's hard to know what to make of a proportional increase. Sales of such products are in any case miniscule enough that the big internet trackers such as Jupiter Communications and Forrester Research don't track them.
   Analysts believe that down the road there may be even less demand for such products as more people connect to the Internet using high-speed DSL or cable modem technology. The faster speeds will eliminate the primary reason for their use.
   Nail says web advertisers should be far more concerned with the ad filter that sits between a person's ears. It's free, he notes, takes no expertise to install, and it improves with age.