I saw an article today regarding a Firefox plugin “that erases advertisements from web pages”. It got me thinking about the effect that this would have in today’s web world. Most of today’s Web 2.0 sites make their money via placed ads on their sites rather than the old way of charging their users for the service that they are providing. That or Google spends $400 million to buy them out. Either way, if this really takes charge and more and more people start doing this, what will happen?

Now most web users don’t seem that savvy to install a Firefox plugin to me but that’s just my opinion so I really don’t think that the ship is starting to sink. But I also think that most of the Web 2.0 users out there are more savvy than someone like my dad who calls it the “interweb”. So if enough of the regular 2.0 users stop seeing ads, how will these companies make up the lost advertising money? My thought is that they will start charging a fee for the use of their previously free tools and most people will just say forget it and leave. Not a lot of people want to pay $10 a month for some cute 2.0 tool.

To me this might signal the downfall of the Web 2.0 wave that has been riding so high. Not as bad as the dot com bust years ago but still not good. Now I’m not saying that this little plugin will cause a bust so don’t start calling me out on that. I just saying that if people didn’t look and click on the ads we see on every web site, things might be a little different. I personally don’t mind the ads that aren’t intrusive on a web page. Ones that you see on the side or bottom of a site. 99.9% of the time, I just ignore them. I have been known to click on 1 or 2 in my life.

Plus imagine with Google will do if they started seeing a decline in ads server via Adsense? I’m sure they would come up with another way to get them in front of users. They have smart people there.

I doubt that this plugin will be the end of Web 2.0 but it was just a thought that I had reading this article today. What do you think?

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