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Although now in beta, Adblock Plus (a adblocking software) has decided to bring out a new service that will allow certain ads to pop up on your screen. Ads on Adblock? Sounds like an oxymoron, and technically speaking, that exactly what it is.
Instead of blocking all ads from the Internet to make sure that nothing interferes with whatever it is that you are trying to do, Adblock takes it upon itself to decide which ads are inappropriate for you and which are inappropriate.
Even little brother is trying to be big brother now!
AdBlock wants to steal from Publishers
Evidently, what Adblock considers acceptable, (read good) ads, are smaller, more subtle and — in the eyes of Adblock — less annoying to the person who is trying to work on the computer. That means AdBlock will no longer be the best free adblocker!
Ben Williams, Adblock Plus director of operations and communications, claims that this move permits the monetization of two different ecosystems at the same time and do this on the user’s terms.
The company claims that acceptable ads is a step closer to what it believes will be a better move for all. Since 2011 Adblock Plus has been running a program, an extension of an Acceptable Ads program in conjunction with Adblock Plus. In this clever move, the ad blocker’s default “whitelists” approved ads allowing them to show up despite the fact that users have the ad blocker turned on like the google ad blocker.
Advertisers Pay to get Ads Ignored by AdBlock
Since publishers or networks have to pay Adblock Plus, and work with the company on its own terms, to have their ads considered acceptable, this takes time, effort and of course, money.
It is the hope and intention of Adblock Plus, through the invasion of this new marketplace, to expand the usage of what it considers acceptable ads. Since the acceptable ads will now be public and ready to go, any publisher may sign on and quickly run the whitelisted advertising. These ads however, in a move that is supposed to make the program more user-acceptable, will not be used to track visitors and their size and page locations must be defined by the guidelines Adblock will include with the program.
The presentation of this new program is clearly intended to make it appear friendly to publishers. After all, Adblock will now allow a publisher to display some ads rather than none at all.
Publishers very unhappy
Publisher nevertheless, may still have reason to be unhappy with this situation. Generally speaking, acceptable ads may be less valuable to the publisher than the ads a publisher might otherwise choose to use, thereby limit a publisher’s income from advertising. In having set up its own on-line marketplace in this way, Adblock Plus now assumes the position of Head Gatekeeper manning a tollbooth that charges publishers to enter a gate that Adblock itself built and now maintains.
In beta, publishers will keep 80% of all ad revenue generated by ads in the marketplace while the remaining 20% will be split up between the oth4r parties involved. In any event, Adblock will take 6% off the top, thus assuring its own profitability.
AdBlock admits users aren’t happy
Ben Williams admits the reason that, at first, publishers might not be thrilled with this arrangement, but he claims that this new Acceptable Ad Program is intended to solve a problem that was bound to appear sooner or later. He insists that blocking ads would be here, with or without Adblock Plus. He adds that acceptable ads is a step in a direction the company believes is better.
Slowly rolling out
Launched today, this beta program will test the waters with the intent of being able to launch in full later this year.
Adblock Plus is now working with the idea of forming a committee of publishers, privacy advocates and advertisers to join together in determining their mutual hopes and preferences for the acceptable ad guidelines should be.
Adblock Plus hopes to have all that in place by the end of this year with the committee meetings starting up in 2017.
