Firefox Limits Rich Media Campaigns by 22%
by matt @ 12:13 pm. Blogged under Web Technology, Banner Advertising, Rich Media, Web Design & Usability
Mozilla Firefox is clearly the largest rival to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser; my own recent analysis put its use at 22% of the 3.5 million audience I sampled (up 2% on January 06). However, whilst popular with web users the browser is not making the life of online advertisers (or ad operations staff) any easier. Firefox is Adobe Flash enabled, but only enabled for standard in-page units such as a 728×90 leaderboard or 160×600 skyscraper. Anything that I class ‘enhanced’ rich media’ such as an ‘expand on mouse-over’ format will malfunction.
Most commonly, an expanding campaign served in Mozilla Firefox will be displayed fully expanded but within the dimensions of the standard in page unit. From the example in this small screenshot you can see that rather than filling the full width of the page, the leaderboard banner is tiny, its proportions constrained – with a 290 high fully pre-expanded advert crammed into 90 pixels of available height. This means that enhanced campaigns have to exclude Mozilla entirely from the flight plan, with an optional secondary standard campaign running instead.
Losing 22% of the available audience is not ideal for rich media advertisers or the publishers selling their space to marketers. An enhanced campaign provides much better metrics – panels viewed, interaction time, direct data capture or product search functionality and most importantly a greater amount of information for the audience – without them having to click through and leave the content that they are engaged with.
Banners are not ideally suited to direct response, they’re a distraction from content; click rates are typically low in comparison to the likes of text based search engine adverts (this has more to do with the only purpose of a search engine - clicking links - than anything). For content publishers enhanced rich media provides an opportunity for advertisers to engage in brand building through user interaction – not something that search engines can currently compete on without ramping up their contextual offerings. So come on Firefox, get your act together and support the likes of Motif, Eyeblaster and Pointroll, if not please pull Flash support completely so that we don’t have to explain this issue to clients in such detail!
Technorati Tags: firefox, rich media, flash problems
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December 12th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
This is not a limitation of Firefox, but more a limitation of the rich media vendor’s technology. EyeWonder has supported Firefox on Mac and PC for quite some time now, as well as some less popular browsers.
Our own numbers show our rich media technology accounts for a 10-20% increase in actual rich media ads being served versus a backup gif or jpg. It looks like our numbers may be a bit conservative compared to your 22%, but we are happy to take it:)
Check out EyeWonder’s viewer reception information: http://eyewonder.com/support/viewerReception.cfm
(There are a few demos in our showcase from before our support, but any new ads on the web or in our showcase all support FF).
December 12th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
Thank you for posting Ryan, I’ll now be in touch to find out more about EyeWonder since both Dart Motif and Pointroll seem to be at a major disadvantage.
March 8th, 2007 at 9:30 am
What on earth do you mean by statements like “Firefox is Adobe Flash enabled” and “come on Firefox […] please pull Flash support completely”? There is NO Flash support bundled with Firefox, and neither will there be until there is an open source implementation. The ONLY way to see Flash in Firefox is if the user by his/her own free will decides to install a third-party plugin!
March 8th, 2007 at 11:01 am
I stand corrected, it had been such a long time since I installed Firefox that I forgot that I chose to install a plug-in. Perhaps I should have said ‘come on Firefox, block the pointless plug-ins which don’t work effectively anyway, give us a warning message to let users know that Flash isn’t fully supported’.