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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.
"identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net."
That will be hard to find since such a thing does not exist.
As if not bogging your browser down with thousands of css rules every page wasn't enough.
While I see Adblock's behaviour as *very* problematic (it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity), without the supervision by democratic entities. Slippery and that (lots of examples come to mind, like a private entity in UK deciding that the image of a record cover is too obscene for Wikipedia, remember?)...
seeing Springer talk about "professional journalism" gives me the eeries too.
I choose to not side with any of them.
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
I'm amazed at each passing year how bad advertising gets on the internet. I doubt I click on more than 3 ads a year with content or a service that actually interests me. With the array of annoyances advertisers put into their arsenal over the last few years it's no wonder users are rejecting this experience. People on the internet come here for information and the exchange of ideas. We're accustomed to rapid fire, text based experiences. Content that produces annoying animations, loud sounds, or obfuscates content with a forced click to close something is not just annoying, it reduces the usability of the internet. I can remember when a website with a banner was considered to be a sellout. Just off the top of my head I can think of the vast array of websites I visit that are no longer usable without adblock: cnn.com (background), potterybarn.com (annoying hover ads), pier1.com (also annoying hover ads), youtube.com (every other video is now a 2 minute ad) .....
Is it any wonder with experiences like these we want to use this?
I have a no-no sticker on my letterbox that prevents unadressed paper advertisments. Running adblock is like having a no-no sticker.
Adblock is now looking for a middle ground. Instead of having a no-no sticker you can have an adblock-sticker that says: some unaddressed advertisment is allowed (ie. the ones allowed by adblock). If you translate this to the paper world it could mean only ads printed on recycled paper, only single page ads; not a whole booklet, ads that are clear and concise etc.
I don't mind supporting websites I like, but I absolutely hate advertisments that take over the page, 'steal' my attention or look like content. It's a fine line and as it stands the consumer is pretty powerless to find a good middle ground. Website owners are also pretty powerless because they don't have enough control over the ads that appear on their site. It's also difficult for ad makers because there are no guidelines. Only an entity like adblock has the power to force advertisers to behave: ie. behave or be blocked.
I don't quite understand the argument of people who don't want adblock to move in this direction. If you don't like it, switch to one of the many other adblocking plugins. Im sure there will always be one adblocker-like plugin that will aim to block all ads.
I see this as a healthy development, one that could finally rid us of annoying ads while making sure content providers get compensated.
I could also see a system where adblock works with ad providers to distribute revenue. For instance, you could chose to pay adblock (or some other entity) a monthly fee that gets distributed over the content providers that you consume. Kind like Flattr or YoutubeRed, but a system that could work on any platform, from any vendor.
Once upon a time ads annoyed me, I chose Adblock PLus because it got rid of the annoying ads.
Adblock Plus stopped doing a great job at blocking annoying ads and has then been uninstalled and everyone moved on...
Adblock Plus now wants to make it's inferior product worse to make a buck.
*looks at Ublock Origin icon and laughs*
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
That's some nice advertising you've got there... It'd be a shame if someone decided to block it...
But seriously, okay... you pay off ABP. A large group of users migrate to another ad-block tool... that tool's creator demands protection money... and so on. That, to me, is why it sounds so scummy -- because ABP can only promise not to block for it's own user-base. It's literally, "hey, give us a cut of your ad-revenue or we'll give a free app to people to prevent you from serving ads."
Does this policy undermine their "acceptable ads" option? i.e. ads are now acceptable if they meet a certain technical criteria or the provider has paid protection money?
Hahaha.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
You don't have to. Quote from: github.com/gorhill/uBlock
BEWARE! uBlock Origin is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the web site ublock.org
The donations sought by the individual behind ublock.org are not benefiting any of those who contributed most to create uBlock Origin (developers, translators, and all those who put efforts in opening detailed issues). For the differences in features between uBlock Origin and uBlock, you are more likely than anywhere else to find an unbiased explanation in this Wikipedia article.
Racketeering is good semantics for their current business model indeed, as there is no supervision whatsoever right now. Like Bild (end everybody else) I also don't think Eyeo is doing this in a "transparent enough" way that there's no doubt they aren't enforcing an "advertising fee" in their "controlled space of the web" (i.e. everyone who uses their adblock, their only de facto product). It should be clear enough for users of adblock, and for "payers" of whitelisting what this money is for, and a clear description of what "work" it entails to whitelist some ad (and/or an entire website/domain).
If it is to be done right, Eyeo needs to disclose publicly it offers two products: AdBlock - a free piece of software that has no direct form of revenue; and "Verified Whitelisting", a service that consists solely on periodic validation of conformity (with their "sensible ads" paradigm) for each company that so requests.
Eyeo then needs to bill each company transparently for the actual work hours taken to verify the requested pages (including hours wasted in scenarios that involve telling the company some site does not conform due to reason XYZ). But most importantly, these billed hours need to be made public. Only through transparency can companies AND users be assured that Eyeo is doing what it publicizes it does (only validate "sensible ads", and not any ads by highly-profitable payers). This way, the practice starts entering legal ground. It's pretty much a process like legalizing weed - the state can be sure there's no trafficking because all business go through their supervision, but mostly just the fact it is due to go through state supervision is enough to stop abuse. Give supervision power to every user of adblock, and Eyeo is sure to do most of its business in the way they publicize, without actually making more money than they should be doing for such an easy job.
And most important of all - AdBlock development costs cannot overlap with the whitelisting paradigm costs. This final detail is what separates racketeering from the legal practice of creating this "sensible ads" paradigm and its validation process.
Disclaimer: this is my opinion. I am no Law expert, but to me - as a citizen and user of adblock - this is what makes me comfortable. I will stop using adblock as soon as I see abuse in this whitelisting process in clear form. But I am not a company paying for whitelisting, so I don't get their side of the picture as well as I should.
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