Adblock Plus Now Sells “Acceptable” Ads
Adblock Plus, formerly one of our favorite tools for blocking ads, cleaning up clunky website interfaces and preventing website tracking, now sells “acceptable” ads itself. These “acceptable” ads are designed to replace intrusive ads and provide the perfect compromise for consumers and advertisers.
Instead of removing all ads from your internet browsing, Adblock Plus now tries to remove bad ads with less intrusive and less annoying ads. They will place an advertising space where website owners and operators can select “acceptable” ads and place them on their pages where bad ads have been. When Adblock Plus users visit their page, they will only see “acceptable” ads, not regular ads, but you will still see ads.
According to Ben Williams , director of operations and communications at Adblock Plus, this new Acceptable Ads initiative should be a worthy “user-advertiser compromise,” which makes sense on an idealistic level. Without advertising, many sites would not be able to work. This change allows website operators to support some form of advertising while making the experience more user-friendly. But if you think the idea of an ad blocking service selling ads seems a bit backward, you are not alone. Williams’ blog post announcing this move is already generating a lot of backlash from users . If this news makes you look for another ad blocker, uBlock Origin is a quick and easy alternative .
Adblock Plus and (slightly) more | Adblock Plus Blog via The Verge