Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by timothy on from the listen-fellas dept.

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.

11 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. No such thing by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net."

    That will be hard to find since such a thing does not exist.

    1. Re:No such thing by Teun · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For me that's similar to what a printed publication does, there it's on the same sheet of paper, on the web it's presented by the same server.
      The moment an ad turns into a tracking device there are good reasons to block it.

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    2. Re:No such thing by Anrego · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Meh, if it:

      - Stays quietly off to the side somewhere
      - Clearly distinguishable as an ad
      - Doesn't slow down page load time
      - Isn't a scam
      - Preferrably doesn't do an excessive amount of tracking

      It's acceptable in my books.

      That said, the adblock guys are about to blow their own foot off. Nothing they do is that complicated, there are already workable alternatives.. the only reason they are so popular is that they've "just worked" for the longest, but it won't take much of this crap before they see their entire userbase migrate to something else.

    3. Re:No such thing by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      - No tracking
      - No animation
      - No sound
      - No Javascript
      - No plugins / Flash
      - No third party hosts
      - No delays >10ms to auction the ad
      - Max 10Kb of data
      - No adult content unless its an adult site
      - No obfuscated links
      - No more than 10% of the page area
      - No mixing ads and content, ads must be clearly separated and identified
      - No overlays
      - No interstitials

      In addition, AdBlock must enforce these rules in the plug-in, i.e. whitelisted ads get overriden if it detects they contain scripts or >10kb of data or make the page take >50ms extra to load.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    4. Re:No such thing by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Amazingly the Internet existed before there was advertising on it. I know, right? Amazing!

    5. Re:No such thing by wbr1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I have already switched and am pushing uBlock Origin as an alternative to my customers. Having a ruleset for allowing non-intrusive ads is one thing. Taking shakedown money to allow big players through is another and unacceptable.

      --
      Silence is a state of mime.
    6. Re:No such thing by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Advertisers are moving to product and story placement now. Whole articles that are basically ads. Fake reviews. The next level of ad-blocking is to filter that crap out too.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    7. Re:No such thing by Anrego · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm largely of this mindset, but as I said in an earlier comment somewhere, it's pretty hard to know what's being tracked or passed along on the server side. Server side tracking is more difficult than tracking that largely relies on client side mechanisms, but only just, and if pushback continues I think that's what we're going to see.

      I for one would love to see more containerization on the browser side (prevent those facebook cookies from being sent unless you're actually on facebook) to become the norm, but unfortunately the rise of content distribution networks makes it hard to do this generically without breaking all the things, and a lot of people actually like the whole "oh, it knows my facebook, cool!" thing.

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion