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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.
Maybe a generation change will fix this.
I worked at an ad agency at the dawn of the commercial Internet. The people on the advertising side of the business had all kinds of problems adapting.
The print people wanted it to be another print medium and were frustrated by their lack of layout control and font selection. Their tool was giant images with click regions because they could basically export an Illustrator file as a graphic, so you'd end up with sites that were just a giant collection of images with click regions that led you to more images with more click regions.
The TV people treated it like another TV set, at first with just inserted videos, next with semi-interactive Flash animations that still had all the intelligence of a one-way TV commercial.
Perhaps in the not-too-distant future the people who didn't grow up on standard, commercial television or tweaking print layouts down to the pixel AND who came of age frustrated by overlays, popups, interstitials and understand ad blocking will become ascendant and stop imposing old thinking on the web.