Wladimir Palant, Adblock Plus, and the profitable war against unacceptable ads | Hacker News Reader

Wladimir Palant, Adblock Plus, and the profitable war against unacceptable ads

technologyreview.com

17 pointsnkurz9 comments

Making money off of ad blocking, via donation or not, is ethically dubious; it's a bit like ads on torrent sites, which I also find unacceptable. Both situations financially profit off of someone else's intellectual property without compensating the owner.

Further, the whole "acceptable ads" thing is extortion, and any ad-blocker that engages in that should be removed from stores. It's criminal behaviour, plain and simple.

Is there any honest, legitimate way to do the "acceptable ads" thing? I agree that having the adblocker creator charge for entry is ethically dubious, but I actually want to see non-invasive ads; I believe that conscientious advertising is actually the most benevolent way for the typical website to fund itself,* and I want to encourage that sort of good behavior. At the moment, though, I pretty much have to build the "good advertiser" list myself, and that's not really practical or scalable. Is there any way to incentivize a global "acceptable ads" list that isn't super sketchy?

*Subscriptions are exclusionary, donations often aren't enough, merchandising isn't practical for many sites, sponsored content and advertorials are obviously reprehensible...am I missing anything?

I think a good starting point is to divide ads into categories/sets, with a good default being ad network ads I think.

The honest way would be to simply not charge for unblocking. If it's being done by a party whose only interest is to see better ads on the web, then that seems honest to me.

Yes, this is an interesting question.

Exclude all non-static ads (flash/etc). Get the whole size of the ad (and associated JS) and the information it collects from the user and 'vote' based on that

Different users might have different levels of what's acceptable to them.

The ideal way would be to show more of the 'best' ads and none of the worse, but of course for that you would have to show ads. Maybe some adblocker could allow for 'voting' of ads

Besides the acceptable ads program being an obvious cover narrative for extortion (that would be criminal in almost any other industry), my thought was always: if in some alternative universe this business model starts to gain widespread traction, where does it end? SafeAds by Java on 500m PCs? AdFish by Lenovo, powered by some OEM adblocker? LiveAds for Windows by Microsoft with 85% market penetration?

Yeah, charging for a bypass around the ad blocker always struck me as verging on extortion.

After reading the article, I feel like the Acceptable Ads program is a little more complicated than the "extortion" some are calling it. The tiered scheme where "small websites" can apply for free and only "larger properties" pay seems like it could be a reasonable way of dealing with the financial overhead of maintaining the list if it's run fairly and transparently; that transparency seems to be lacking at the moment, but that may be changing soon ("We’re inviting a completely independent review board to take over, enforce and oversee our Acceptable Ads initiative").

It's at their forum. https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=89fbc67...

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