
Wladimir Palant, Adblock Plus, and the profitable war against unacceptable ads - nkurz
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/543311/the-ad-blocking-kingpin-reshaping-the-web-as-he-prefers-it/
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empressplay
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.

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PhasmaFelis
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?

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interpol_p
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.

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nugget
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?

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

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PhasmaFelis
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").

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ethana
It's at their forum.
[https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=89fbc67...](https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=12&sid=89fbc67cc7a03f8b46502d0034cf154a)

