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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.

6 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 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.

    2. 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
    3. 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.
    4. Re:No such thing by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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

    Comment removed based on user account deletion