🐱 Adblock to start selling ad space

http://gizmodo.com/adblock-plus-is-now-going-to-sell-ads-1786568975

Adblock Plus, one of the web’s most popular ad-blocking services, will soon begin selling its own ads—and taking a little bit of the cut as well. Seems counterintuitive, huh?

But it’s not entirely surprising. Adblock Plus has been positioning itself for a long time as a kind of online advertising firm. The company is now just making concrete what was originally read-between-the-lines ambiguous. According to The Wall Street Journal, Adblock Plus’ parent company Eeyo is teaming up with an ad tech firm to being selling ads through its “Acceptable Ads Platform” by means of its own marketplace. Even Google will help sell these ads through its own ad ecosystems.

These acceptable ads are immediately allowed to pass Adblock Plus’ filters by default if they meet the company’s own criteria of size, placement, etc. The Verge reports that 80 percent of the revenue from these ads will go to publishers as other online agencies—along with Adblock Plus’ 6 percent cut—will take the rest.


Adblock Plus uses the same justifications now as when publishers first grumbled about its Acceptable Ads initiative in late 2011 and soon beganwhitelisting companies like Google, Amazon, and Taboola, for a price. Adblock Plus see themselves as a force for good. However, many publishers think that adblockers amount to a sort of restrictive third-party tampering with their own business model. And of course, this new initiative will likely only fan those flames.

 

[Pikimon]

lol rekt

 

[AnOminous]

Adblock Plus uses the same justifications now as when publishers first grumbled about its Acceptable Ads initiative in late 2011 and soon beganwhitelisting companies like Google, Amazon, and Taboola, for a price. Adblock Plus see themselves as a force for good. However, many publishers think that adblockers amount to a sort of restrictive third-party tampering with their own business model. And of course, this new initiative will likely only fan those flames.

Also it sounds like turning their business model into outright extortion through anticompetitive trade practices, which they were already dancing on the edge of. This goes right off the cliff. Oh well, they will be replaced, plus it's possible to block shit anyway.

 

[NQ 952]

So what you're telling me is that there's going to be some space available for the taking in the ad blocking business

 

[ERROR_ENTRY]

Just another reason to use Ublock Origin

 

[Splendid]

Just another reason to use Ublock Origin

This is literally all that will happen.
Gg ad block.

 

[ZehnBoat]

adblock gonna die, and the people running it are going to freak out and start doing shady shit

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Also I'm sure AdBlock us bogging down browsers intentionally if you are not running on a high memory machine. To get you to 'relent'.

 

[AnOminous]

For an ad blocker to sell ads is like an oncologist handing out cigarettes to his patients.

 

[Hodor]

 

[RJ MacReady]

I love how ABP is trying to take the moral high ground by calling them "Approved Ads" as if they're doing it for purely altruistic reasons and not to establish themselves as a parasitic middleman all corporations must pay tribute to if they want to do business. This level of blackmail makes the mafia grind their teeth in envy.

I wonder if this'll start a cycle of everyone moving from adblocker to adblocker because the previous one also couldn't resist cashing in on their gatekeeper status.

 

[Splendid]

I wonder if this'll start a cycle of everyone moving from adblocker to adblocker because the previous one also couldn't resist cashing in on their gatekeeper status.

Nah, ublock has been quite consistent in keeping things ad-free. I think we're good for the forseeable future.

Edit: Rate me optimistic all you want, in two years I'll remember this post, come back to it, and revenge rate you all dumb!

 

[RJ MacReady]

Nah, ublock has been quite consistent in keeping things ad-free. I think we're good for the forseeable future.

It's also only getting seriously popular just now. ABP was on the slippery slope for years before they went off the deep end because they needed enough users to subjugate the big advertisers.

Edit: Changed rating to autistic for caring about ratings.

 

[LulzKiller]

ABP's problem for a lot of people is that it bear hugged RAM

 

[Yaks]

Isn't this essentially the same thing as the Whitelist program that Adblock implemented about a year ago? I thought they were both under it.

 

[Hypodermic Johnny]

If you're looking for other alternatives to ABP (which I myself stopped using because it sucked at filtering out ads on some ad-heavy sites on top of being a memory glutton) to go with your Ublock Origins, I'm personally fond of Goodblock.

It's made by the same people who do Tab For A Cause, which is where you open a new tab and there's some small, unintrusive ads in the corner and the revenue goes to a number of charities (Conservation International, Room To Read, etc.). Goodblock will block the ads on every other site and all they ask is you look at one picture ad a day so that they can garner that same revenue for charity. And the advertisers are screened to avoid any malware-type ads (usually from large, established companies - Disney, ThinkGeek, whatever).

I mean, ads are annoying, but at least this way they're doing SOMETHING useful/helpful.

 

[Don't Call Anybody]

The problem lies in the power stripped from users when source code is hidden behind a proprietary license. Under those circumstances, making money by abusing power held over both advertisers and ordinary people is inevitable.

Spoiler: Another browser extension to consider

If browser tracking for targeted advertising bothers you more than the ads themselves, Privacy Badger is a good solution. The EFF made it with the goal of blocking trackers that do not respect "do not track" preferences in one's browser settings. Privacy Badger ends up blocking many ads as a result. Because it's free and open-source, it's not at the mercy of companies trying to sell their own ads or "analytics solutions" to help advertisers circumvent current blocking interventions.