I stumbed accross this website several months ago:

Explorer Destroyer (As of the time of this posting it’s currently down though)

The basic premise of the site is to get people to use Firefox while at the same time make you some money. Sounds good right? There are three different levels that you can use on your site only two of which can help you make money off of users downloading Firefox with the Google search bar:

Level 1: Gentle Encouragement Rating: $$
Visitors using IE see a message encouraging them to download Firefox (with a download link) running across the top of the page.
Level 1 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)

Level 2: Semi-serious Rating: $$$$
Visitors using IE get a friendly splash page encouraging them to download Firefox. There’s a download link, and a link to continue on to your site.
Level 2 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)
Update: Xavier sent us this modified version of level 2 that will only show the splash page occasionally. Download it here and see a live demo here.

Level 3: Dead serious
Level 3 will not allow people using IE past a splash page. This level is very useful for sites that are not IE6 compatible. And there’s never been a more important moment to switch people to Firefox. Can you handle it? (At least try it for a day to see how good it feels.) Unfortunately, level 3 is a little too intense for the Adsense policies, so for this level you’ll have to use a regular, non-Adsense link to download Firefox.
Level 3 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)

Several months ago I decided to use Level 1 on one of my small sites:

Free Video Game Fonts.

If you’re using internet explorer you’ll see Level 1 and if you’re using FireFox you won’t. In any case, here are the results:

As you can see the Firefox referral has performed terribly. For displaying the ad close to 17,000 times and only resulting in a one dollar profit is pathetic. I think that perhaps one main reason why the referrals have preformed terribly is because of how long FireFox has been around. Lots of people have the program and many of those in the video games niche have it as well. I can estimate that of the 17,000 impressions I’m sure there is significant chunk that visited the site with internet explorer even though they have firefox on their computers.

I’ll be removing the explorer destroyer code from my websites soon so if you want to see it in action just check out GamingFonts.com. It is pretty laughable that this preformed so poorly, but then again perhaps it’s also humorous that I left the code on the site for that long. Either way, it’s always imporant to experiment with new ideas because you never know which ones will pay off.

If you would like to see more case studies and read about my successes and failures while running an online business subscribe to my RSS feed.