Google, Amazon, Microsoft Reportedly Paid AdBlock Plus To Unblock

RoccamOccam writes with the following news from The Register: Internet giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola have reportedly paid AdBlock Plus to allow their ads to pass through its filter software. The confidential deals were confirmed by the Financial Times, the paper reported today [Paywalled]. From the Register's article: Eyeo GmbH, the German startup behind Adblock Plus, said it did not wish to comment. So far more than 300 million users have downloaded its software, it said. The add-on is free to download, with Eyeo generating revenue through its "whitelisting" programme. Companies can request their ads to be unblocked as long as they comply with AdBlock's "acceptable ads" policy. Large companies pay a fee for the service.

Comments

Adblock Edge

[Anonymous Coward]

'nough said.

Re:Adblock Edge

[TuringTest]

ÂBlock (read as "micro-block") has smaller memory footprint than AdBlock (and therefore Adblock Edge), and can use the same major privacy lists (EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's Ad Server).

Company does exactly what it says it does...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Companies can request their ads to be unblocked as long as they comply with AdBlock's "acceptable ads" policy. Large companies pay a fee for the service."

How is this news? Seriously, how?

Re:Company does exactly what it says it does...

[the_other_chewey]

In the past the end user can still opt to not see any ads, even if they comply with the "acceptable ads" policy. This would be news if they are making a change so that the end user is forced to see a given ad that the advertiser pays extra for, regardless of their extension settings.

They are not.

Re:Company does exactly what it says it does...

[blackraven14250]

It's extraordinarily well known that they accept unobtrusive ads - go to their web page, and it's literally bullet point #2 under their heading, sandwiched between "Blocks banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube" and "It's free", with a link to a page describing *why* they do it and instructions on how to turn it off if you so choose. Many of the people who use Adblock Plus, myself included, use it specifically to block intrusive or broken ads, rather than all ads. As an example, on Twitch, there's ads that play in certain spots of the stream determined by the streamer - that could be fine, except for the fact that Twitch ads are broken. They don't adhere to volume settings, and frequently crash the player - a giant pain when you just happen to have a stream on while doing something else, especially since they always run a "preroll" ad when you load or reload a stream, which itself can crash the player. That's outright unacceptable. Google ads, OTOH, are about as unobtrusive as they get, and don't outright break the sites they're on, so I don't have a problem with that.

Re:Company does exactly what it says it does...

[flappinbooger]

So... this isn't news?

I can click a 'switch' and turn off 'acceptable ads' and it's been that way for a long time now.

So maybe it IS news because I didn't know/realize/take the time to think about the fact that they make money off this.

Good for them. They deserve to eat too. Adblock Plus is reliable and makes the internet tolerable and safer. Letting through some 'GRAS' ads for cash is fine with me. As long as there is a switch where I can turn them off too...

(Generally Regarded as Safe)

Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people get AdBlock to avoid intrusive adverts. I don't see this being a problem for them.

However some, such as myself, use AdBlock as part of an anti-tracking solution. This concerns me more.

Re:Things

[Crashmarik]

That said I understand why companies resent having to pay someone to allow them to make money by verifying their ads are 'acceptable'.

Their users resent them allowing third party Flash/Javascript adds that are frequently attack vectors.

Re:Things

[Grishnakh]

That said I understand why companies resent having to pay someone to allow them to make money by verifying their ads are 'acceptable'.

Tough shit: if those companies hadn't tried to ruin the internet in years past with popups, popunders, flashing banner ads, and all kinds of other obscenity, users would never have bothered resorting to adblockers.

Opt-out

[pr0nbot]

I'd assume (without further info) that this is about the "allow some non-intrusive advertising" checkbox you get in the filter options. It's on by default, but when you install adblock (as I did a few days ago) it one of the things you go through when the configuration dialog pops up.

It links to: https://adblockplus.org/en/acc...

It's not perfect in that it's on by default, but it's easy enough to disable. Perhaps they could improve it by tying this checkbox to your "do not track" preference?

Bound to happen

[Andrio]

Everyone running ad blocking software is not sustainable, since ads pay for a lot of stuff. People also don't want to have to directly pay for things (plus, could you imagine if every website was paywalled?)

Seems to me that the best solution is to just run unintrusive ads. People don't really mind ads all that much, they just hate it when they're noisy (literally and metaphorically) and get in the way

Re:Bound to happen

[Bigbutt]

Sorry, as long as ad companies occasionally accept ads by malware companies, I'll keep running ad blocking software.

[John]

Re:Bound to happen

[ColdWetDog]

I'm not particularly interested in the 'sustainability' of the Internet. Google and a couple of other companies that have more money than the Catholic Church can worry about that. I'm interested in my privacy and peace of mind.

Re:Bound to happen

[pjt33]

could you imagine if every website was paywalled?

No, I can't imagine that. In particular, I can't imagine paywalling my own site (or putting ads on it). I remember the days before advertising was big on the web, when content was provided by universities and hobbyists. Comparing the web now with the web then, I suspect that the death of online advertising would harm clickbait sites more than ones with valuable content.

Re:No facebook?

[pmontra]

I'm also a Firefox user, with AdBlock. I disabled the acceptable ads checkbox so I don't see any ad (I would have noticed). If AdBlock makes any money out of the ads companies, good for them. If they force acceptable ads to everybody, I'll move to something else. uBlock seems to be as good. There will always be something to block all ads. At worst the hosts file.

Switch to uBlock, it's better

[Petronius]

Faster, better, hackable and free. https://github.com/gorhill/uBl...

Re:Extortion

[gstoddart]

Hey, these companies put their stuff up freely available on the internet, and make no attempt to block us.

If they think that magically confers some obligation on us to look at every damned ad their website serves, they're full of crap. How many times to ads end up serving malware? Do they take any responsibility for that? Or just say "wasn't us"?

They may think they have some magic click-through license, but I'll be damned if I think all of those analytics and ad companies should have access to all that. I'm not conducting a transaction with those companies, I'm viewing your publicly available website which makes no effort to keep me out.

Not my problem about your ads.

Don't want me to block your ads, make your site subscription based and block me out entirely.

But don't act like I'm somehow ripping you off. Since their privacy policy is crap, we're just enacting our own.

Scorecard research, doubleclick, quantserve, and literally HUNDREDS of other companies ... their product is information about me. But I never signed up for that.

So if some billion dollar media company wants to piss and moan that I'm not watching their ads ... fuck 'em, stop me.

I rank this crap right up there with "by reading this billboard you agree to have this 3rd party company rifle through your wallet". Yeah, no, there's as many as 30 third parties on a lot of sites ... and I've signed a contract with NONE of them.

Re:Adblock has never failed me.

[meta-monkey]

I installed ABP and Ghostery on my grandfather's browser and left the little ghostery notification up so every time he browsed a site he'd see all the trackers. He was stunned. You go to cnn.com and there are 16 trackers. I hid the notification window later because it's annoying, but if you're not aware of this stuff, it's rather eye-opening. Browsing without a half-dozen blocking add-ons is like walking through the mall naked.

I run:

Adblock Plus
Ghostery
NoScript
BetterPrivacy (deletes Flash 'Locally Shared Objects,' which are Flash cookies a regular cookie-blocker/deleter won't notice)
Certificate Patrol
HTTPS-Everywhere
Flashblock
Smart Referer

And my default search engine is Startpage.

Any other recommendations you've got, IT Pro?

Re:There is no such thing as an unobtrusive ad

[Zalbik]

There is no such thing as an "unobtrusive ad."

That very term is offensive and is an oxymoron.

obtrusive (adj.): noticeable or prominent in an unwelcome or intrusive way.
advertisement (noun): a paid announcement, as of goods for sale, in newspapers or magazines, on radio or television, etc.
oxymoron (noun): a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction

You misunderstand the definition of one of the words you are using.