Many people have some sort of advertising blindness when surfing the Web – unnoticed banner ads, unread Google AdWords. Of course, online advertisers are working hard to make ads more noticeable and effective without annoying potential customers in the process.

It turns out the customers are fighting back.

The New York Times reported this weekend on AdBlock Plus, “an easy-to-use free addition to the Firefox Internet browser that deletes advertisements from Web sites.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Times article (read the whole thing here):

What happens when the advertisements are wiped clean from a Web site? There is a contented feeling similar to what happens when you watch a recorded half-hour network TV show on DVD in 22 minutes, or when a blizzard hits Times Square and for a few hours, the streets are quiet and unhurried, until the plows come to clear away all that white space.

But when a blizzard hits Times Square, the news reports will focus on the millions of dollars of business lost, not the cross-country skiing opportunities gained.

Likewise, in the larger scheme of things, Adblock Plus — while still a niche product for a niche browser — is potentially a huge development in the online world, and not because it simplifies Web sites cluttered with advertisements.

The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model.

It doesn’t seem possible yet to build a quality version of Adblock Plus for Internet Explorer, the more popular browser, but the growing popularity of Firefox still has advertisers nervous. Originally an alternative Web browser for geeks because of the customization options, Firefox has captured more than 10 percent of U.S. Web users and is continuing to grow. BetaNews  reported last summer Firefox had captured 15 percent of Web users in the United States and higher percentages elsewhere in the world.

The backlash to the program from advertisers and the response to the backlash is nearly as interesting as the program itself. Advertisers are reportedly blocking access to their sites from the Firefox browser, since the sites cannot block the Adblock Plus extension. (As a side note, PC World magazine named Adblock Plus one of the 100 best programs of 2007.)

Blocking ads is bad for advertisers – that’s a given. It’s also bad for the Web sites that display those ads, as the blocked ads probably won’t count in CPM models. That’s also obvious.

The problem with this backlash response is that these highly-computer savvy Firefox users are good people to have on your site. They’re quite likely to be Power Users, which NAA defines as people who “spend more time online…and are more likely to have high-speed Internet access…much more interested in news content, entertainment content and various online services than non-users of newspaper sites. Demographically, Power Users are younger, better-educated and more affluent than non-users of newspaper sites.”

Wladimir Palant, who runs the Adblock Plus blog, posted links to a few articles and responses to the Adblock Plus backlash.

I admit there are a few ads I would like to block: Most mortgage ads and weight loss ads that have animated GIFs, for example, because they’re not effective to me and the animations are distracting in a negative way. That’s just me.

But I think Palant really hit the nail on the head with this solution, included in a blog entry quoted in the Times article: “There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren’t blocked — make sure the users don’t want to block them.”