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AdBlock Plus To Introduce Independent Board To Oversee Acceptable Ads Program
Mark Wilson writes: Ad blocking has been in the news quite a lot recently, not least because of iOS 9's new support for advertising avoidance. Perhaps the most famous tool in the arena is Adblock Plus. It's something that many people have become reliant on for cleaning up their online experience but Eyeo — the company behind AdBlock Plus — has been keen to encourage people to permit the display of some advertising through its Acceptable Ads program. That companies can pay to bypass Adblock Plus is nothing new, although Adblock Plus insists that most ads that are deemed 'acceptable' are added for free. Today Eyeo announces that it is going to hand over control of the Acceptable Ads program to a completely independent board.
I'll tell you my definition of them: If the host in question serves the ad from its own servers, and doesn't use any Javascript or Flash.
Anything which just links to external ad companies, analytics companies, and expects to run code on my machine is blocked. Because expecting me to trust code execution from a 3rd party is simply not happening.
If I can't do that, then I'll pretty much block every form of ads I can.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Your host files are crap and out of date APK. I got pwnt because an IP address in your hosts file took me to some malware site as the hosts were out of date!
Fuck your hosts files APK. Just fuck them.
Because expecting me to trust code execution from a 3rd party is simply not happening.
This is an interesting intersection of trust issues.
You don't trust a 3rd party. Fair enough.
But the 3rd party doesn't trust the publisher either. Advertisers can't trust publishers to report how many times an ad was viewed, because the publisher has a very strong incentive to "cheat" and claim more ad impressions than really occurred. This is why the advertisers absolutely insist that the ads be delivered from a 3rd party server under their control so that they can trust it to report the correct metrics.
In fact, it's this lack of trust that makes ad blockers possible at all. Ad blockers have an easy job: they simply blacklist the domain names of known ad servers. But if the publishers served the ads directly from their own server, then ad blockers would have to solve the brutally difficult AI problem of figuring out the difference between "content" and "ads" that are both intermixed inside one HTTP response.
The publishers would love to serve the ads from their own servers, just as you want. But that's never going to happen, because the advertisers can't trust the publishers to do that. Be very thankful for that lack of trust, because that's the only thing that makes ad blockers possible, which, in turn, is the only thing that makes the Web tolerable.
As you say, 'damn few' do, but some do. Some offer the option to subscribe, or pay a once off fee to remove those ads. My concerns in those cases are that it means remembering a separate account for each such website, signing into those websites each time my session expires in order to remove the ads, and paying a significant sum of money if I do it on too many sites.
That's why I've started webpass.io, a service that offers websites an easy way to offer the option to pay for content, but that avoids these extra kinds of concerns.