You would think that the world was coming to an end because someone developed an extension that would block out ads on a web site. The interesting bit is that it has polarized into two camps, ones that will use it regardless of arguments, and those that quite frankly do call it theft.

Realistically though it is really more of a number of other issues, one of them being the adoption of Firefox globally. When Firefox announces that they have 400 million downloads to date, many people think that the Adblock extension at the center of the controversy has also been downloaded 400 million times. The Adblock extension has been downloaded 2.5 million times based on best estimate from the programmer.

This is a lot of hay over nothing much, and as we get into an escalating arms race between web sites that block Firefox based on an assumed use of a plug in, and Firefox folks figure out ways to bypass those blocks, as CNet points out, this is an arms rate that web site owners will loose. Let us look at some numbers.

2.5 million of 400 million works out to 0.00625 percentage of all Firefox downloads that use the extension. Lets make an assumption that ¼ of all Firefox downloads have not been installed, leaving 300 million available users, leaving 0.00833 percent of all Firefox installs that are in use as actually using the Adblock plug in.

Looking at the stats for this site, 40% of all our visitors use Firefox, so for every 100 users, 40 use Firefox, statistically based on .0083% only 0.332 people who visit the web site for every 40 Firefox users use the extension. 1/3rd of a person, potentially by the numbers who visits this site uses the Adblock program.

Given our click through rate of less than 1%, we are potentially loosing 0.0003984% of all ad clicks in a 24-hour day. This is not enough to give us the idea to block Firefox users, not when I have 40 Firefox users for every 100 people who visit the page. While it may be a moral high ground issue, as a business decision, that would be a foolish mistake to kill off 40% of our users, because the potential of 1/3 of a user who might potentially be using the Adblock program.

Sorry folks, theft this does not make, statistically it is insignificant for the level of commotion, nail biting, recriminations, accusations of theft, and moral debates. It is an interesting debate, but the real numbers based on this web site do not add up to a major loss of “revenue” from people not clicking on our Google adsense ads.

Realistically, the click through rate is less than 1%, we still at least have 60 IE users for every 40 Firefox users, and the numbers still do not jive. Rather than a knee jerk reaction blocking off a set of users, take a look at the real numbers for your web site, and then make a decision.