When you say "all browsers", did you mean to include these three?

1) The one run by an advertising company which happens to employ a lot of engineers

2) The one paid for entirely by a deal for search engine services with the advertising company from #1

3) The one run by a software company which owns an advertising platform and under absolutely no circumstances will exit any market entered by the advertising company from #1

?

The article assumes that advertisements will remain discrete objects that are readily separable from content. Deeper integration of ads with content (e.g. from ad servers also serving content images, or ads placed within video content) may break that assumption.

The article fails to mention the biggest players in the ad market have a vested interest in browsers and what eventually becomes 'default behavior'. I doubt they will shoot themselves in the foot or won't lobby to avoid this becoming a default.

Microsoft controls IE, Google now has Chrome and I have to think Google still has some type of partnership with Firefox.

Google pays the Mozilla Foundation $50 million or so a year to be the default search provider for most versions of Firefox. This provides about 90% or so of the revenue the Mozilla foundation earns.

But I'm sure they could totally give that up if the users wanted it. smiles wanly

Opera has a somewhat similar deal (for all their browsers)

If that's true, then in five years nothing on the Internet will be free.

No, the focus would shift to "I am making this site because I love it" sites again. Less void but more genuinely interesting and good content. Well, this is dreaming of course.

Sites like Hacker News will still be around.

Not all free content relies on advertising.

C2 Wiki will still be up. I guess I wouldn't mind losing out on some of the stuff that relies on advertising, but some of the other stuff will make me sad to see go.

affiliate links would just become the #1 source of revenue

The fact that ad blocking even works today shows that advertising is highly profitable.

An industry wide ad-resistant browser initiative doesn't make sense. What's now just a shrug of the shoulders would quickly turn into a powerful lobby.

What would be more interesting is if browsers visited internet advertisements by default, but sent the return pages to /dev/null...

So the browser clicks on every ad but never displays the results to the user, so it's like it never happened? Basically throwing online advertising into chaos?? I like it!

I think if web-based advertising ever got close to being unprofitable, people would find a way around Ad Blocker really fast.

I've already had a site (forget which one) refuse to serve up its content until I turned off ad blocking. Of course this could get into an arms race involving Flash etc. which would be horrible.

Then just install a non-caching proxy like Privoxy. Works for me.

Browsers don't need to block all advertisements, just the annoying ones. Users will just ignore the rest.

How much money do you think consumers spend as a result of internet advertising? The amount of money that can be sustainably made in the industry is significantly less than that.

The ad industry markets to clients, not consumers. On the internet, unlike every major medium before it, clients have stats to show them that their ads don't work.

When TV dies, so will advertising as we know it.

There are some adverts that viewers send each other, a nice analysis of that trend is the spreadable media series of articles by Henry Jenkins (http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it... - this is a kind of summary).

Microsoft shipping IE with easy-to-enable advertisement blockers, might be the biggest blow they could deal to Google at the moment.

Of course, they are unlikely to do so now that they have invested so heavily in emulating Google's business model.

ReplayTV had the ability to automatically skip commercials on TV 6-7 years ago and I'm sure the same articles were all over the news. It didn't really happen, now did it?

I don't block ads. Well, I guess running Chrome on Ubuntu means I block Flash ads, but it also means I block all Flash (and Java and any other plugin).

I think Murdoch probably paid this guy. :P That might explain the continual repetition of "People do not like Advertisement". I got scared at some point that he is rewiring my brain or something.

Umm, I have some problem with my teeth. There was this advertisement which mentioned a tooth paste which helps tackle it, I was kinda glad that I saw that advert. Then there are these advertisements with cool songs, hey it might just lift my spirit for a bit. Sometimes, I kind of want variety in my food and wonder how I may try something new, what is out there to try, guess tv advertisements may inform me at some point. The idea that people do not like advertisements is rubish, people do not like seeing the same advert over and over and over again, but they do like to be informed about what is out there.