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Adblock Plus Comes (Somewhat) Clean About How Acceptable Ads Work (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: The Acceptable Ads program from Adblock Plus has proven slightly controversial. The company behind the ad blocking tool, Eyeo, has already revealed a little about how it makes money from the program - despite the fact that no money changes hands in most whitelisting cases - and today it has opened up further about how is makes its money.
Whilst recognizing that people do want to block ads, Eyeo is also aware that sites do need to benefit from ad revenue - hence Acceptable Ads, non-intrusive ads that it is hoped are less irritating and therefore easier to stomach. But Eyeo itself also wants to make money. How does it decide which company to charge to Acceptable Ads whitelisting, and which to charge? If you're expecting full transparency, you might be disappointed, but we are given a glimpse into how the financial side of things works.
Whilst recognizing that people do want to block ads, Eyeo is also aware that sites do need to benefit from ad revenue - hence Acceptable Ads, non-intrusive ads that it is hoped are less irritating and therefore easier to stomach. But Eyeo itself also wants to make money. How does it decide which company to charge to Acceptable Ads whitelisting, and which to charge? If you're expecting full transparency, you might be disappointed, but we are given a glimpse into how the financial side of things works.
It's colored differently and has an 'ad' flag.... At any rate the "Acceptable Ad" thing just sounds too much like the kind of stuff Yelp is accused of, which sounds like what the Mafioso used to do... I know it's popular to hate on advertisers but I'm kinda with them on this. You know. Nice web site ya got heres. Be a shame if anything happened to it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Let's chat about this after ad revenue has dropped far enough for the advertising networks to fully understand how much our satisfaction is a factor in their success.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
There are a few new snippets of information, sure, but there's hardly full transparency; ... We are instead treated to a short blog post littered with links to other pages on the Adblock Plus site, forums pages, and so on.
TFA (as per quote above) is a vague blog post that attempts to describe another vague blog post. Most of TFA is spent admitting that there is very little content to talk about.
Any entity that implements an acceptable advertising policy as is specified on the Adblock Plus web site can request to get added to the Adblock Plus white list. The caveat is that if you are a large commercial entity not only do you have to follow the acceptable adds policy, but you also have to pay for the privilege. Paying alone is not sufficient to get white listed if your a large company. Smaller companies and projects don't have to pay to get white listed- they merely need to comply with the acceptable adds policy and request to get white listed.
This is actually the free market at work here and a totally reason solution. There are some companies that may choose not to pay up and some may even block Adblock Plus users in turn. That is the choice of these web sites and it's my choice whether or not I want to utilize these sites on those terms. Adblock Plus gives me the choice to decline to utilize web sites with poor privacy, security, and add policies. I'll continue to decline to utilize sites that implement a policy of blocking Adblock Plus users rather than implement a reasonable adds policy.
I am also an advertiser on the Linux Mint web site. I own a small company that pays Linux Mint directly to have an advertisement on the site. I also use Adblock Plus. I wish Clem (lead developer) would implement the acceptable adds policy as 60% of the visitors don't see our advertisement. I *still* support Adblock's policy and have encouraged Clem numerous times to stop with the flashy advertising so that we can request to have the site white listed. Unfortunately due to one advertiser we lose 60% of the eyeballs visiting the site. I have recently cancelled our advertising for other reasons, but pointed out this issue, alongside a note saying we'd probably return and that the cancellation (many years we've advertised with them) had nothing to do with this. None-the-less I encouraged him to implement the policy.
How does it decide which company to charge to Acceptable Ads whitelisting, and which to charge?
If the owners don't fix errors in the summaries, how can we expect the editors to?
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
I stuck with ABP for years - it had always worked well for me so why change? It was only when they started with this white-listing that I looked around for an alternative. uBlock has worked well ever since.
But the white listing has done nothing. I still have seen no ads with ABP even with the white listing. Maybe I'm just careful about where I visit, but I wouldn't drop it until I start finding it to be ineffective.
We're now getting into a war similar to the spam war. The advertisers are going to shout louder and louder. The technical experts are going to block harder and harder. We're already at the stage of having adblock-block-blockers. The advertisers will soon try to get laws to make these illegal, if they haven't already. This will get nasty for the normal users and cause a collapse similar to the collapse of News Net. We will be able to use the internet but new users will be stuck on particular closed sites like Facebook.
The path out of here needs someone independent of the advertisers to agree on criteria for safe, accetpable, reasonable advertising (no tracking, no popping up, no taking over the whole page, no active elements). It can't be done by people like the IAB or government advertising agencies who are in the pockets of the worst elements of the advertising industry. It won't work to completely ban advertising except, possibly, by having your teleco provide control it which is almost more scary.
Right now Eyeo's Acceptable Advertising program seems to be the only game in town. Google and the new ad replacing browser are the alternatives. It needs our support until something better comes along.
I leave the Slashdot 'Disable Advertising' box unchecked. Becuase I am not bothered by the ads, and maybe now and then something might catch my eye, and I'll give it a click....supporting Slashdot as I do. Bills have to be paid after all. However, if the ads were in the face 'YOUR PC IS AT RISK FROM VIRUS' etc, then this is unacceptable..... This is what AdBlock is for, to get rid of these crappy fear-ware ads. I honestly don't mind seeing ads that don't get in my face.
You didn't have 20 pages of You'll Never Believe What Happened Next! Quality clickbait!
You do realise it's not compulsory to take the bait, right?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I would. Just because something works doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate alternatives. I found ublock to be quite a bit less resource intensive. Not relevant on a computer but critical on cheap tablets and outdated hardware.
This revenue allows us to hire employees to do the hard work providing that service demands. Software engineers have to maintain the whitelist, monitor it and provide customer service to each whitelisted site, whether payment is involved or not.
So they need to charge to pay for the manpower and infrastructure needed to be able to charge. A bit of a circular argument. The Easylist block list is over six times longer than the acceptable ads whitelist, yet is maintained by volunteers. I'm sure the community could maintain a whitelist if salespeople were no longer required.
If it doesn't block all the ads, it's not an ad blocker. It's just an ad filter. That's not what I want.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Can you pay a large sum to allow ads with viruses to get whitelisted?
I assume you are paying for Slashdot and not using this service for free?
- Raynet --> .
It was such an ugly ball of string and red tape that large bulletin boards were still seen as a serious competitor.
What, you didn't enjoy having to script your SLIP connection and hoping that the terminal server login hadn't changed? For the longest time, the only mail access I had was through my local BBS that supported SMTP, but Fido was still the go-to solution if you wanted to talk to people outside of your area. Of course, back then we dreamed of having our own T1 too. And if you wanted porn, you had to be handy with a newsreader and uudecode.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
What happened to "If its not broke, don't fix it" mentality?
While I agree with knowing alternatives, I'm sure ad blocking software would be LOW priority on my list to just know about.
How in shit did you get modded up for your bitchwhining? You can turn off acceptable ads with one checkbox which is respected by the addon. It's not broken, you just don't know how to use it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ever wondered how many sites would disappear without advertising revenue to fund them (hosting and bandwidth has to be paid for somehow)?
Not really, no. Their bad business model is not my problem.
Or are you prepared to pay a subscription or fee for every website that you use?
I'm prepared to pay a subscription to every website that provides me adequate value to justify a subscription. I already do this for several. Most don't provide much value and I wouldn't mourn their loss. Very few provide enough value that I would willingly sacrifice my privacy and web browsing habits to an advertising company.
Don't ask APK to live up to his word or be honest. Everyone knows that the first rule when dealing with a spammer is that spammers lie. APK is no exception. If he wanted to be honest then he would have made an account and used that to post instead of making a bunch of AC posts that try to pass themselves off as someone other than him.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black