Adblock Plus Letting Some Advertisers Pay To Avoid Its Filters

Adblock Plus is an internet browser extension that allows users to disable advertisements on the webpages that they visit. According to the Wall Street Journal, Adblock Plus has started to allow some companies to evade their ad-blocking system. In return, the companies compensate Adblock Plus for allowing their ads through Adblock’s filters.

The ad-blocking service is the most popular desktop ad blocker on the market. Users of the service may already notice some ads displaying even with Adblock enabled. The frequency of advertisements displaying even while Adblock is supposed to be blocking them will most likely increase.

Adblock Plus is allegedly accepting payments from 70 different companies in exchange for being whitelisted from their filters. Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, says that any company seeking to avoid their filters must abide by their “acceptable ads” policy.

Eyeo explained further on their site that a service like theirs can’t be run without the payments from the advertisers.

“This service cannot be completely taken over by volunteers nor be sponsored through donations, as it happens with common filter lists….Therefore, a few very large entities who take part in the Acceptable Ads initiative compensate Eyeo for its service. Eyeo’s service is provided free of charge to all other participants (roughly 90%).”

Being able to avoid an ad-blocker’s filter may sound like a good thing for publishers and advertisers, but it might not be such a great idea after all. For publishers anyway, this could mean a decrease in revenue. Since money is being spent just to get the ad to the viewer, that means less income for the publisher.

While it may be a better alternative to not making any revenue when an Adblock-enabled visitor loads your page, many publishers and advertisers may find it to be a far from perfect solution.

The debate over ad-blocking has been raging lately. Things really got bad when Apple recently released iOS 9, which enables developers to make ad-blocking applications for iOS users. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, one developer pulled his app from the Appstore after realizing he didn’t want to be a furnisher of an ad-blocking app.

The developer, Marco Arment, created the app Peace, which briefly reached the top sellers list on the Appstore. It was downloaded thousands of times before Arment abruptly removed his app.

Ad-blocking has become a huge problem for online publications and other websites that rely on ad revenue. Some estimates put the losses associated with ad-blocking at over $20 billion just this year. Other more conservative estimates put the number at somewhere around $1 billion.

[Photo via Wikipedia]