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Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

My thoughts when reading that (in order):

- With as many pivots as Flattr had, it should be called Flattr 5.0 (after reading the headline)

- Hmm, actually looks really interesting now, and they seem to have tought about the major pitfalls (after reading the blog post)

- Nope, not gonna touch that! (after finding out that flatter was acquired by the makers of Adblock Plus)

(Oh boy have I made many dismissive comments today...)

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> - Nope, not gonna touch that! (after finding out that flatter was acquired by the makers of Adblock Plus)

What's wrong with Adblock Plus? I use it. I thought it was supposed to be good. Is there something I've missed?

They charge advertisers to unblock ads. So actually you will see ads as long as Adblock Plus is making money. They are generally seen as untrustworthy compared to something totally free like uBlock Origin.

So actually you will see ads as long as Adblock Plus is making money.

It's literally one checkbox to disable the whitelisted ("non-intrusive") ads.

As long as that setting is opt-out and not opt-in, they deserve all the criticism they get for this shady business model.

A lot of people have issue with the fact they allow certain ads through if the publisher pays them enough. They claim that these ads are not aggressive or distracting, but the optics are pretty bad. A for profit ad-blocking company that makes money from ads.

I think this is the main reason basically everyone has switched to uBlock Origin. Which, by the way, works quite well.

And ghostery

Ghostery keeps trying to steal my attention with annoying popups.

Ghostery also has some tracking built-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Criticism

I tried to switch to the open source Disconnect when I heard Ghostery was acquired by an ad company, but it wasn't on Ghostery's level.

The redirect / social button blocker with the "allow once" option is really pleasant.

Doesn't Ghostery too make money from selling their hoarded user data to the very same advertisers and marketers?

EDIT: Yep, it does - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model

Which also has an interesting opt-in Business Model.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery#Business_model

"Millions of people use the tool Ghostery to block online tracking technology—some may not realize that it feeds data to the ad industry."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/516156/a-popular-ad-block...

They are a company so they have to make money (Most of HN readers should relate to that).

Some of this money is also used to fight law-suits, keeping ad blocking legal (at least in germany [1]), something a free solution like ublock origin can not do.

[1] https://www.golem.de/news/adblock-plus-olg-muenchen-erklaert... (german)

If you're not a company, legality is less important.

> something a free solution like ublock origin can not do.

The core of the lawsuit was about Eyeo's business model specifically, charging for being listed in a whitelist. This of course does not apply to uBO.

I think the lawsuits started before Eyeo introduced the whitelist?

But imagine if uBO was used by 90% of all Users, so the big publishers would notice and lobby to get ad-blocking banned, there would be no one to defend it then.

Or if google took over ad-blocking by making it build-in in chrome (and of course whitelisting it's own ads).

edit: just realized you're the ublock author! I didn't mean what I said as an insult to you (like you wouldn't care to defend adblocking). I just think it might be beneficial to have a commercial player in ad-blocking (that isn't google) from time to time.

>I think the lawsuits started before Eyeo introduced the whitelist? That's correct. Publishers explicitly say that they don't want to have adblocking at all (Whitelist is just a sideshow). You can also see that from the lobbying activities in Germany pushing for an anti-adblocking law (https://netzpolitik.org/2016/informationsfreiheitsanfrage-lo...) and other proceedings with smaller adblockers. Plus, most obvious, it is way easier for a German publisher to sue a German company rather than a someone behind a project whom you don't know and obviously not seated in Europe.

Last time I read about it, it was still the users choice whether they wanna see those non-aggresive ads. Did it change?

Personally I see it as a good choice. I don't have a problem with ads themself, but with aggresive or harmful ads. So educating the companys to use better ads is good for the users.

You are entirely correct PurpleRamen, nothing has changed.

There is no way of just paying eyeo to get your ads through the system. If you confirm to the acceptable ads standard your ads can be classified as that and visible to the people that has not chosen to block those too.

For the huge sites, a cut of the ad revenue is taken, more or less as for any other ad network/service really. The full info is here https://acceptableads.com

Well that is actually not correct. 1. Only those publishers, which comply with the Acceptable Ads Criteria (www.acceptableads.com) will be passed through and only to those users who haven't decided to block all ads. 2. Only those publishers pay money, which get more than 10 Millionen additional ad impressions via the Accéptable Ads program. 3. Acceptable Ads Criteria are already handed over to the Acceptable Ads Committee (AAC): https://acceptableads.com/en/committee/. The AAC is an independent committee, made up of eleven stakeholders who represent three distinct coalitions: User Advocates Coalition (digital rights organization, ad-block user), For Profit Coalition (advertiser, advertising agency, ad-tech company, publisher / content creator) and the Expert Coalition (user agent, creative agent, researcher / academia).

I don't get that either. Eyeo is a german company, so the rather strict german privacy laws now apply to flatter. I think thats a good thing.

https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

They're wishy washy with language, but the long and short is that they charge companies to whitelist their ads.

As I commented above, I think they're providing a service with fighting law-suits for ad-blocking.

I use ublock origin myself, but I don't think my parents will ever install it or even read about it. And a company with an interest to make money might reach them and spread the usage of ad-blockers in general.

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