Danny Carlton writes a little known personal blog under the pseudonym “Jack Lewis” at jacklewis.net/weblog. But don’t try to visit it if you use Firefox, because he’s banned users of the popular browser from visiting his site. Firefox users are now redirected here.
Why? Because he objects to the fact that some of those Firefox readers are using an ad-blocking extension to block ads showing on the site. To counter the problem, he’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater and kicked 13% or so of the Internet off his site.
While Carlton is certainly enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, in my opinion this is not a good strategy to build a blog. Users are solid gold. Even the ones that block ads. They sometimes write comments, which is free content. They link to you from their own blog. And they tell friends about your site. All that leads to more readers and, ultimately, more revenue. If a user wants to skip the ads and is willing to go to the trouble of installing ad blocking software, so be it. I still love ‘em. And I gladly hand them my content for free.
Carlton doesn’t agree, apparently. Although I wonder why he continues to provide a full content feed, sans ads, at jacklewis.net/weblog/atom.xml (and it has been reposted here). Those users are “stealing” his content, too. What about them? Perhaps he’ll now turn his attention to the evils of RSS.
The Internet will certainly be a less colorful place without Carlton’s passionate editorial. A perusal of his blog posts (via Safari) tells me he thinks Barack Obama is a communist and that “fourth graders can be lied to and told the Theory of Evolution is a fact.” The problem is, Darwin was right. Only the fittest survive. And Carlton just made his blog an endangered species.
For the record, I block all TechCrunch ads. Then I guess the inventory switches every month or so and they reappear, in which case I block them again. At the same time, I, myself, author various blogs and publications that I spent a lot of time on and depend on ad revenue for a living but I hold no qualms in believing that the second a word I type is left online, it will be used in ways I never imagined.
The record industry has been on waging this losing war from the start and to date, they’re just seen as neandolithic and moronic. Take a hint: you make stuff, you let people enjoy it, and if you can make money on it consider yourself lucky.
It’s a choice on both ends.
I love TC because Michael lets me link to my unknown website. Thanks for letting me spread the words. Regards!
He’s almost as dumb as the block-IE ’standards’ crowd, like OpenAddict and the idiotic Digg users that cheer the move on. If anything, this guy is about a billion times more reasonable.
By the way, discussing Darwin anywhere near a guy that looks like this is just cruel.
#3 – yeah, link removed. Freeloader.
From what I can gather having read his blog: God commanded that he block Firefox users as they were anti-gun pot smoking commies who buy goods from China, and hence deserve to have their children poisoned by lead. Apparently it’s not good that school kiddies cant get free bibles because it’s all part of a global conspiracy where free speech is denied to Gods chosen people: IE users…or something like that, at least that’s what I found when I visited his site using Safari
Great editorial there! A nicely crafted bit of pithy prose with a punchy point. How did this fellow get noticed anyway; there must be thousands of similarly spirited souls out there. And why does he post pseudonymically?
Sounds like a first class assh0le to me!
why are yall covering this
come on
we expect better from tc
Not that I have any ambition to read his shitty blog, but he doesn’t block opera, which comes with a “block content” feature built right in.
for half a second i was tempted to load up safari and see what the site was about. I am glad he has made it easy for me not to waste any time visiting the site. It completely baffles me …. aside from the obvious PR value of the stunt. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to forget about his site had it not made techcrunch.
In a time where people try to provide the content to anyone who will listen in as many formats as possible ……this is backwards.
I don’t block ads but i do use flock ….
cheers scott
@Textbook case
Just wait until he finds out about PithHelmet! Then Safari users will find themselves getting the boot.
For me, ads themselves are not the enemy. It’s the misleading ads, or the speed bump, ‘interruption’ ads that are the most offensive and annoying (pop ups, or those banner ads that – when your mouse pointer moves over them – suddenly expand like the Blueberry girl in Willie Wonka).
I’ve clicked on a number of ads on this and other blogs – ads I find intriguing and potentially useful. They’re sitting there, not interrupting my reading experience, and I can choose to click on them. Why would I ban them? And why would I not want to support sites that I find useful, and that make an effort to respect readers and showcase quality advertisers.
Some ads are stupid and reflect the product being advertised. Some provide a benefit for some, and are designed to remind us of a product we read about in a post or recommendation somewhere. I look for deals and shop on the net … so why wouldn’t I want to check out tasteful and creative ads that may lead me to a product or service I might want?
Thanks, Mike! This was a lot of fun to read.
Anyone else feel compelled to send this guy the complete works of Richard Dawkins?
How do you explain moving cloud in Evolution Theory?
What a tool. Danny Carlton, not Firefox’s ad blocker.
My problem isn’t the ads themselves, it’s the slow-as-molasses ad servers. But, hey, you want to block my browser? Great. One less blog to pay attention to. Douchebag.
He blocked Firefox users and redirected them simply for publicity, and a tinge of spite when he learned about AdBlock Plus. His case is hardly logical, since other browsers have ad blocking software, yet he singles out FF because Mozilla hosts the plugin. Please.
He knew he could get the ire of the Firefox community; why else would he create an entire page dedicated to explaining why he’s blocking them? It’s actually a nice move. The publicity he’s getting is greater than the Firefox users he’s blocked. DO NOT VISIT HIS SITE! Bad TC.
@Cam
I’m with you
Maybe its time to put info first before ads.
Ads suck.
With that said, I just looked up at the RSS ticker for TC and realized its above 600k. Are you guys going to plan anything when it hits the big 1,000,000?
Maybe you guys should run a little contest – guess the date when TC hits 1 mil subscribers.
Either the guy has some severe problems with logic (as is entirely possible with the “Evolution is just a theory!!!!!” crowd) or he is an attention whore (not that the two are exclusive categories).
His argument is that people are taking money from him by looking at his site without ads because it uses bandwidth and he gets no ad clicks in return. So what does he do? He redirects them to another site he owns. So is the bandwidth for that site free? And he tells other people to use that code that redirects to his own site — which uses even more bandwidth.
That”ll show ‘em!
Like him or not…this has been a great PR event for his blog. Blocking firefox has brought him tons of free publicity (and page rank). And I’ll bet most of the blocked firefox users checked out his site in IE just to see what they were missing.
Well..he seems to have manipulated T C by proxy. Mike wrote about it. He has been TechCrunched, Nuff said
I was curious so I visited his site, was exposed to the ads. I wished I would have left well enough alone. This guy is a whack job. I have an uncle who looks and appreantly acts like this guy. Everything is a liberal conspiracy to these guys. “Fighting injustice with the lasso of truth”? (Paraphrashing) Give me a break. I hope this guy and his narrow minded views (including browsers) make $11.34 annually.
He also has posts where he writes things like “that’s the difference between Christians and Liberals…” as if Liberals are incapable of being Christian for some reason…
In case anyone would like to contact Mr Carlton directly.
Whois for jacklewis.net
Registrant:
Danny Carlton
[deleted]
The dude’s from Oklahoma, that should explain most of it.
Where in the world is Catoosa?
Anyway, what about IE blocking all those Undertone ads? Isn’t that the same thing?
i deleted the address in #27 above. I realize this is public information, but there is no reason to distribute it.
Good post! The last few sentences are solid gold.
I think we should nominate Danny for the “blog darwin awards”, who cares about ads, readers are readers… Michael isn’t a non-profit, he needs to buy an umbrella just like the rest of us to stay out of the rain
Jon
While I disagree with Mr. Carlton’s decision to block Firefox users, I also think it is concerning that users feel so free to use ad-blockers. I know, there are certain types of intrusive ads that perhaps should be blocked, but Google Adsense and similar programs are non-obtrusive. Why block them? Do we as consumers always have to get our own way no matter the cost to the business? This ends up not being good for anyone. Rather, we need to seek mutual benefits – a symbiotic relationship so to speak.
I’d also like to note that while I can understand some of the frustration at Mr. Carlton’s actions and his political viewpoints, a lot of ad hominem and etc. occurs when it comes to individuals who believe in creationist/intelligent design theories, which are no better than the ad hominem attacks some of these individuals throw out against evolutionary theorists.
Great post! Thanks!
What. The. Fuck.
Ok his website works on my firefox… I change my User Agent to IE7 (Vistard) and all is well
So I get my firefox lovin’ and I also get zero Ads.
For the record I use my own custom ad blocking filters with adblock plus. So I see zero advertisements on websites I go to, which includes techcrunch. I do have a generic subscription set too just in case I visit random sites. Makes the internet a lot more clean.
I’m looking forward to being able to rip youtube movies back to pieces and taking the ads back out of them eventually too… Depending on how the ad is encoded of course. I haven’t even seen any of those ads yet.
However, If you’d like to escape the firefox ad blocking – or indeed any javascript based blocking tool so Opera as well… there is an easy way you can do it. Embed the images as base64 – all the blocking tools *usually* work on the principal that the images are hosted outside the page on some advertising server… Or at least in some kind of separate folder.
Firefox can handle images embedded in base64 – IE can’t. Redirect people based on their User ID and send them to a page with ads. If they want to disable them literally one at a time, more power to them.
However, I’m sure if you clusterfuck my browser with some inordinately huge number of ads – i’ll do exactly what I did before I got adblock plus and just close the thing… If there’s only a few I probably won’t bother. I’d gather this is like a lot of people.
I use firefox and flashblock along with others. There is no way I’d change my setup for one site. I don’t so much mind seeing an add or two, but there is a limit to how much junk I want to see. I can’t stand flying, floating, talking, annoying and irresponsible ad/spam behavior that some sites employ. Perhaps if advertisers and publishers were more considerate of their content layout, and the viewer’s experience, this problem wouldn’t exist.
A guy blocks FireFox from his relatively low-traffic blog.
This is news why exactly?
Typically, people go into long rants about it, completely over-blowing the situation: I can’t remember the last time an entry was posted on TechCrunch about The Great Firewall of China, or any other such obscene technical abuse that takes place. Or to a lesser extent but still annoying, Microsoft doesn’t exactly tailor it’s online applications to FireFox, using Hotmail with IE is still a far nicer experience.
But one guy blocks FireFox and the usual theatrics takes place on all the major sites: here’s his address/phone number, do what you will winkwinkwink; god DAMN COMMIES STILL ALIVE LEAVE AMERICA; I hope this guy makes like 0 $ and falls over and stuff; wtf firefox is blocked? world. over. srsly.
Let’s grow up.
By the way, the article says some 13% of traffic.
On my site, while it is admittedly early, over 50% of my traffic is Firefox. This is a huge change from a few years ago when 95% was IE at other sites I have worked at.
But my guess is this guy is talking to a different audience to say the least.
Strange,
Tim McCormack
iRent2u.com – the Online Rental Marketplace
To quote the movie 300: “Freedom is not free at all”
There’s a funny irony here. Because of what this guy did and the consequent coverage, there will be a boost in awareness of AdBlockers for Firefox, which will likely lead to higher installations of the extension.
This is a great post! Michael and Duncan this is worthy of incredible feedback content.
The guy is a moron. His Plato look on life leaves something to be desired. May be he should read Aristotle or at least use Emanuel Kant’s theories to do his analysis. After all there is a moral standard that is being challenged. Michael having your background in law – I’m sure you can appreciate this.
with my 2.0.0.6 of mozilla version, its blocked. Maichel point is 100% true.
~ MIR
http://www.mailsiread.com
I can’t believe the level of press this guy is getting.
This must be international be an asshole and linkbait the blogosphere week, between him and the guy who ran the fake $2500 contest on his blog.
He is so uninformed on so many issues. So narrow. I bet there are a million like him just waiting to get linked on techcrunch.
Once an idiot, always an idiot!
Cam, Duncan – I agree – it’s good that Richard Dawkins is not at all like Danny (fervent, disposed to extreme opinions, trying to bash people over the head with his world view etc)
Looks like pretty blatant linkbait to me.
As someone already pointed out elsewhere, the annoying ads are unblockable. That’s why I do not block ads. (And because I have a blog myself)
Simple answer: publicity. Just wanted the google juice and his name around the web.. Don’t feed the trolls.
28@Jay “The dude’s from Oklahoma, that should explain most of it.”
LOL!!!