Adblock Plus Maker Seeks Deal With Ad Industry Players (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader writes with Yahoo's report that the makers of Adblock Plus are "looking to reach out to advertisers and identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net." That involves convincing advertisers to conform to the company's own guidelines for advertising, or an alternative path much disliked by some of the software's users — to pay the company to ignore ads that don't meet those guidelines. From the article: Big websites can pay a fee not to be blocked. And it is these proceeds that finance the Cologne-based company and its 49-strong workforce. While Google and Amazon have paid up, others refuse. Axel Springer, which publishers Germany's best-selling daily Bild, accuses [Adblock Plus maker] Eyeo of racketeering. "We believe Eyeo's business model is against the law," a spokesman for Springer told AFP. "Clearly, Eyeo's primary aim is to get its hands on a share of the advertising revenues." Ultimately, such practices posed a threat to the professional journalism on the web, he suggested, an argument Eyeo rejects.

Comments

Just more reason to use ublock

[Anonymous Coward]

As if not bogging your browser down with thousands of css rules every page wasn't enough.

Re: Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

ABP jumped the shark a long time ago. The plugin to use now is uBlock origin. It's lighter than ABP, blocks ads and analytics and so on and it has a lot of other nice features. One of my favorites is the way that it not only blocks things like GoogleTags and Google Analytics, it also inserts a javascript shim that replicates their API with noops. This way, poorly written sites that rely on javascript won't break when the expected object/method isn't there. It also fools a lot of Adblock detectors.

Links:
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
Source: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock