Get Firefox campaign pays site owners $1for each person who switches

The browser wars heat up as Explorer destroyer gives away a free IE-detect script that asks IE users to switch, and if they do Google adsense pays referral money. You read that right, Google is paying $1 for each new Firefox user you refer.

Curiosity killed the cat they say, and we simply had to try this out - will people switch? Will this crazy campaign spread to many more sites? Imagine if it spread all over, I'd switch away explorer just to get rid of that ugly bar on top. ;) Web-peer-pressure? We won't keep it up forever - but we must see if it works so lets give it a week.

Firefox, Opera, Safari, Mozilla etc users, see this demo over at ExplorerDestroyer.com to see what you are missing up at the very top of adland these days. Would you participate in this campagn if you had a website+Google adsense? If not, why not? What do you think of this tactic, will it work? Can it work?

Read more on the background of the campaign here: Explorer Destroyer Open Letter : Why we made this site.

Remember those splash pages on websites that say 'You must be using Internet Explorer to view this page'. What if it was the opposite? What if websites said: 'You cannot view this page with Internet Explorer. Please download Firefox to continue.'

It's a tough strategy. On the one hand, we knew it would convert way more people than classy-but-tiny "get firefox" buttons. But would bloggers and site administrators really put a splash page between 90% of their readers and their own content? Firefox fervor had reached a point where we thought that some people might actually do it, web-designers who do constant battle with IE6's lack of standards support. But we knew a lot of sites wouldn't. And we were really busy. So we tossed the idea onto the ol' idea pile and kept on trucking.

Then a few days ago, Google announced that they would pay $1 for each referral to Firefox with Google Toolbar....