2. Adblock Plus has announced on their website that they have introduced "Acceptable Ads", and that it will be enabled by default: http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads
3. It isn't even a secret that they get paid from larger companies, for putting them on the whitelist (they though have to conform to the guidelines for "Acceptable Ads"): http://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements
4. Plus the source code is open source, that everybody can read it: https://hg.adblockplus.org/adblockplus/
So Adblock Plus couldn't possibly be more honest and fair about its "Acceptable Ads" feature. If you don't like it, it's just 3 clicks to disable it. I don't get why lately, everybody is so surprised about thatfeature and feels betrayed.
The German media went completely insane over the past two weeks, and made a scandal out of that feature in Adblock Plus, which exists for quite a while now and was clearly announced and documented from the beginning by the AdBlock Plus Team, and can easily be disabled.
You can't have the whitelist without having ads/networks assessed to see if they meet the criteria. Even if you crowdsourced that [which probably wouldn't be objective enough] you'd need to administrate the whitelist and so you need some revenue to cover the overheads at least. Even automating it there's a cost in creating the code. It seems right to pass that cost on and the networks are the ones holding all the money.
You could have users pay for the whitelisting to avoid "misaligned incentives".
Indeed charging the companies for assessment gives an incentive to reject them so you can charge to assess them again ... 4) profit.
However the comment you replied to was about the accusation that Adblock Plus would be dishonest, which just isn't true.
In other words, extortion.
http://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1h3xdm/accoun...
If you refer to the blatantly immoral and possibly illegal Amaxon referral substitution, that invalidates your entire comment. But I see that even the shills can't even bring themselves to actually describe the indefensible thing they are trying to defend.
"Easily be disabled" they say, safe in the knowledge that most don't know how.
And stop calling people you disagree with "shills", it's obnoxious.
I want to encourage sites providing me with free content to show me adverts that don't annoy me.
And it was announced well enough that I, a non-user, heard of it, so I think 'sneak in' is frankly disingenuous.
chez17's comment implied that the whitelist applies to non-invasive and non-annoying ads, while there are a number of new qualifiers here, including a payment which you have omitted from your post.
>They entered into an arrangement with Google where Google agreed to meet certain standards and be vetted; Bing and Yahoo have not.
..and perhaps most importantly, have paid for it.
The whitelist standard is not just about non-intrusive ads as the title of the setting implies to users, it's about a payment too.
Because it is not relevant. What you said here is true, but no bearing on the thing chez17 and I are walking about (that the ads are not invasive or annoying). I don't have anything against them making money. As long as they are not letting through bad ads, why would I object to them profiting?
> ..and perhaps most importantly, have paid for it.
> The whitelist standard is not just about non-intrusive ads as the title of the setting implies to users, it's about a payment too.
And the relevance is…? Nobody said the transaction did not involve money. A whitelist can only include unobtrusive ads and also charge money for inclusion — those ideas are not at odds. The statement "they are charging money" is 100% compatible with "they are only whitelisting non-invasive and non-annoying ads."
The scammy fake-Download links on this famous page, for example, are provided by Google AdChoices
http://www.alternative.to/Google_Reader,29653017#nav-7647923...
- morals. I don't think unsolicited ads are moral. I'd rather pay. But I generally don't get that choice without an adblocker.
- More choice and ethics. Again. I'm the one to decide what I want to see, not adblock people using a revenue model where they're in a position to force companies to pay them to be on a whitelist. That's extorsion.
And.. I'm pretty sure you get revenue from adverts.
I'm particularly interested in the implicit information conveyed by the mere position of a search result on the page, and how that compares to the implicit information contained by the presence of sponsored content. I would think that sponsored content would on average contain maybe half the amount of information as an organic result, since the presence of the ad is partially a function of its relevance but also a function of the amount paid for its placement, whereas organic result position is a purely a function of relevance.
Then again, perhaps the amount paid could also be considered an implicit source of information on the content being offered, but that seems less reliable.
It certainly isn't a justification to coerce people and even less so to demand that people allow themselves to be coerced.
I'd imagine that most of the time people would only consider clicking on ads they found "not annoying" in the first place.
For what it's worth, on Firefox anyways, there's a fork of Adblock Plus called Adblock Edge that has no such ethical issues, and as far as I can tell, works with all the addon plugins that worked with ABP like the element hider and popup blocker.
Firefox plugins auto-update, who's to say the next update won't have something more objectionable?
So Adblock Edge will probably get incompatible with future versions of Firefox, anyway. And if there are security issues in the code, it is rather unlikely that they will get fixed, as fast as in upstream Adblock Plus, if at all.
On the other hand I think it is way less likely that Adblock Plus will add a lot of features that wouldn't be in your interest, in the near future.
Sure it is a change in the ethical background of the product. Adblock Plus isn't a hobby project anymore. It's a business now. That means that it has to be profitable. But on the other hand that also means that there are more resources available. So the product can be properly maintained, further improved, and ported to new platforms.
I think this "ethical failing" (as you call it), isn't more or less serious, or unexpected, than when Google introduced in-app ads in Android. In the case of Adblock Plus, as well in the case of Android, I'm happy that the company behind the product found a way to make the product profitable. So they can maintain and improve the product.
This is analogous to an antivirus vendor taking money from malware authors to avoid detecting the worm of the day, the only difference being that a text ad isn't as likely to frag your computer.
But hey, in both cases, they're getting money to "maintain and improve the product".
So it would be rather like an AV software that lets by default, installers still change your default home page (or stuff like that), if the installer is fair enough to ask for, but would still block any real malware.
You have a disturbing amount of trust for someone with such an amazingly blatant conflict of interest.
By the way Adblock Plus has put Reddit and some other smaller websites on the white list for free to support them. But unfortunately Adblock Plus has also to cooperate with larger companies to make some money, themselves. But still, all ads that are getting on the white list are mild, and not the kind of ad that made once everybody of us that pissed off, that we started to use ad blockers.
Another thing I would like to mention is that, around the same time Adblock Plus introduced "Acceptable Ads", a lot of websites at least here in Germany started to detect ad blockers and asked the user to disable his ad blocker. Otherwise the website refused to deliver content or provide functionality. With the increase of popularity of ad blockers, the people running websites driven by ads will no longer tolerate that their ads are blocked. And there will be probably nothing you can do against that. Considering that, it is actually great that those websites can just get on a white list used by the majority of AdBlock Plus users. So the websites can continue to make enough money from their ads and people that are smart enough to disable "Acceptable Ads", like you and me, still get all ads blocked.
Last commit was in May, and besides, the nature of the product (single purpose app) is that it won't have a lot in the way of code changes aside from the odd bug fix. It doesn't need any other feature.
Most of the busywork is being handled in the block lists, and ABP and ABE use the same source (EasyList and others)
If the Google leads the fight in making ads good citizens on the web and profits from it - fine, all power to them. If they would start abusing it - I'll turn off the whitelist and all their money would be spent for nothing.
However I still normally disable the ads as I really enjoy the increased screen space gained by removing the ads.
Asking for money to whitelist ads it rather poor policy however. If an ad is small and clearly an ad then whitelist it. If it's not then blacklist it. Having to pay to have your non-intrusive ads whitelisted is shitty. I hope they didn't have to pay very much.