Adblock Plus acceptable ads by the numbers

The money making part was probably the idea from the beginning. They just currently use some fine tuned words in their article... like "open source" to describe themselves and "friendship" to describe their new financial relationship ... "applicants" to describe the ad companies...it's all marketing...and it's quite fitting that the "Acceptable Ads by the numbers" article is nothing but a well worded advertisement for ABP disguised as some sort of informational press release

 

Agreed, but I don't need a third party deciding which advertisements I should allow on a website-by-website basis. Ad-blockers should focus on doing exactly that, blocking ads. If I want to view the ads on a site, its wouldn't be hard to toggle the add-on on/off. I do this for sties that have advertisements I know interest me. It's surprising that companies rely on hit or miss profit from from advertising instead of just accounting for their expenses in their pricing and taxing policies on products and services. I'd be much more responsive to non-intrusive advertising such as newsletters to my inbox or a sales page that lists offers for other companies as well the sales for that week or holiday. This seems like a more mature way to advertise to consumers. Shoving pop-ups and banners that stalk you up and down the page is not. So I agree, advertising is needed, but marketing needs to check themselves. I'm more likely to buy from you competitor if I"m bombarded with pop-ups each time I navigate to a new page.

 

I'm a pretty satisfied ABP user - it has served me well. However, I'm just curious. . . can all of the same EasyList and Fanboy filter subscriptions be used with AdblockEdge?

 

It's my understanding that yes, they can. If you check out the support site for Adblock Edge, they have mentioned updating list of recommended subscriptions. I've not had problem running easylist, but it looks like they support both. I'm running easylist and malware domains without problems.

httxs://bitbucket.org/adstomper/adblockedge/commits/all

 

http://securityspread.com/2013/08/17/adblock-references-blog-changed-adblock-edge/

 

Yes, they want to make money. They have a business, go figure.
How will they live exactly? By waiting for donations from the community?
What's wrong with making money? Do you work? For free? Do you get paid for what you do?

You can disable the option in the GUI, what's the big deal?

Mrk

 

The big deal is some slippery slope argument I'm tired of seeing. More details: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=349411

 

Couldn't agree more.

 

OK, fair enough. I don't like ads myself. So I donate money to projects I like.
I donate several hundred dollars to open-source every year.
How much does an average user donate? Exactly.
Do you see it happening on a global scale?

It is possible that company X has shady notions/morals. I do not dispute that. But you (not you personally) cannot delegitimize every effort by every company to make money as being evil. People need to make a living. I honestly do not see why allowing certain ads, with a full option to disable them, being such a horrible thing. And again, I have no idea what Wladimir wants, I never met him, I do not know what his business model is.

The alternative is - people working on the project getting tired of living off scraps and ditching the project altogether - and going to work for some big company, which won't give you the comfort of choosing what ads you see or not or if you can disable them.

If you look at it from the evilness perspective then:
You should not use any product by a company that participates in prism.
You should not use sony products, they had a rootkit in 2006 or so.
You should not use anything that offers toolbars.
Anything that offers ads.
And so on.

You're left with nothing.

Superior morality is fine, but people need to make a living, and nothing is black and white. You want a sustainable free model, provide them with money so they never need third-party income.

If you ask me, say 100,000 dollars from ads, or from community, the answer is simple. But I don't think the community will ever give it, unfortunately, simply because that's not how it works in our human life. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I know a single entity that manages this, and it cannot be discussed here, because it would mean going into politics and such.

Mrk

 

may i know when addblock plus and the subscription will increase the whitelist?

because in the last days i noticed more add and some pup up ,but i think it's not related to adblock ,it's only suspect

 

^ just disable the whitelist and if you still see ads, report them to your subscription list author (most likely EasyList).

 

First, I should say that I am using ABP with a custom made list, and with the "acceptable ads" option disabled, and that means that I trust ABP enough (for now) to use their product.

That being said, I am not very fond of their idea of doing business. Maybe my moral compass is a bit different than most of the people, but when you build a product, offer it for free to build a user base and then you try to earn money from punching holes in your product, this feels very close to a scam. I'm not saying a company shouldn't earn money; it's their product and if at one point they decide they need to sell it, fine. If it's very good, I pay for it to use it. But what are they doing now feels for me a lot like offering a free antivirus, and then getting paid by virus writers to let some "acceptable" viruses to go undetected. Of course this analogy might seem wrong because we see viruses as being bad, but ads are not that bad (or they are even good, if you ask some people). But for someone who sees ads as being bad, the analogy is quite correct.

 

It depends on how you feel about the idea of "non intrusive advertising". If you accept it and want to allow websites to generate revenue that way then the criteria for white-listing should be are the ads non-intrusive, not did someone pay to be put on the white-list. In fact it could be argued that it's a good idea for advertisers to pay to be put on a white list as long as they meet the criteria for making their ads non-intrusive. How else will they be incentivized to make their ads less obnoxious? On the other hand anyone who thinks this is all BS can uncheck the "allow non-intrusive ads" box. Assuming that that blocks the ads on the white list I don't see how to make an argument against the product...IMHO of course.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...pany-threatening-the-internets-business-model

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=349411

 

If the government created the criteria for non-intrusive ads and "taxed" advertisers so their ads wouldn't be blocked would that be a "mafia" tactic? Maybe it would be, but what will it take to stop offensive advertising? Why is offensive advertising essentially unregulated/legal while Adblock Plus' attempt to impose restraint "extortion"? There's nothing inherently moral about the "market".

 

Exactly That sentence from the Guardian article "First it blocks your ads, and then asks for money to unblock them" suggesting attempted blackmail is an undue shortening as a crucial clause is missing: "... IF the criteria for acceptable ads are met." That's the point.

 

That article is actually ridiculous. The internet industry is said to complain about ABP threatening their business model and call the acceptable ads concept blackmail.

That's completely illogical. If all ads were blocked without exceptions (like in the past years), this would mean a possible threat for that business model. The acceptable ads concept, however, means that less ads are blocked under certain conditions. This is actually a chance for the industry to adapt to new user behavior/expectations.

If the acceptable ads concept is successfull in promoting such a change, I don't mind if Eyeo is earning some money.

 

Then it means that their business model is obsolete and they need to come up with something new. I know that it is hard, because every company treats the internet as a giant advertising machine, but I have faith in human mind(s) to find a new model.

 

Just ran across this neat device. May grab one to play around with.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/adtrap-is-a-little-white-box-that-blocks-all-ads-from-the-internet-for-139/

 

Hi WsFuser
may i ask you how disable the whitelist?
i have adblock plus , i can see the option to disble the whitelist
thanks

 

Adblock Plus Filter Preferences > uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising".

 

Such as?

I'm not interested in the advertising industry, I'm worried about all those countless websites with great contetnt that have to be financed somehow. If people don't want to pay for them, and if they get no revenues via ads - what else remains?

Thus, acceptable ads are an attempt to satisfy both needs: the financing needs of those websites and the users' need not to be overly hacked off. If that concept will be successful remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it's a legitimate attempt.

 

I sometimes resort to a 'Kill' javascript with Opera 12.16 for pesky stuff that is not removed with the urlfilter.ini. The selected element I want to get rid of, by mousing over it, is highlighted in pink.

Before ..



After ..

 

So what's wrong with being up front about that initially? Wrapping their true intentions with touchy, feely promotions tends to destroy credibility.

 

You can also use this (same but it will remember your choice): http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46974