Thanks to the likes of popups, click-bait, and poor targeting algorithms, the internet is very much the Wild West of the advertising world. With no regulatory body besides the sites on which the ads reside, users were growing increasingly frustrated by the deluge of invasive, often malicious content overwhelming their devices.
Then, in 2006, the sheriff came to town. It’s name was AdBlock, and with it came the freedom from excessive advertising that internet users had been looking for.
However, it came with a price. A price of around $22 billion a year, the amount lost by publishers and content creators whose more appropriate ad content was being blocked as well by the nearly 200 million users of AdBlock or similar browser extensions. For while the plugin allowed those who had installed it to allow certain sites to display advertising, very few actually saw the need to enable such a feature.
As is the case in such disputes, publishers reacted in the extreme. AdBlock blockers were incorporated by major content providers such as Forbes (which was eventually countered by an anti-Adblock blocker), and the company has been forced to defend its legality in court five times since inception.
“…they are stealing from publishers, subverting freedom of the press, operating a business model predicated on censorship of content, and ultimately forcing consumers to pay more money for less – and less diverse – information,” declared Interactive Advertising Bureau President and CEO Randall Rothenberg in 2016, when he banned the company for attending their industry forum.
Finally, it seems AdBlock believes they’ve found a way to maintain the peace. Starting today, the company will be selling…advertising.
Publishers will be able to submit ads that meet certain criteria, and if these ads are approved, they will be added to a ‘pre-whitelisted’ selection of content subscribers to the plugin will see by default.
“The Acceptable Ads Platform helps publishers who want to show an alternative, nonintrusive ad experience to users with ad blockers by providing them with a tool that lets them implement Acceptable Ads themselves,” said AdBlock Plus CEO Till Faida.
Intriguingly, this is not AdBlock Plus’ first time implementing a pay-to-play system, but it’s only recently that the move was declared unacceptable, at least in part. Prior to June 2016, any advertiser wanting to be included on the whitelist were charged 30% of the total revenue that ad provided the publisher. In 2013, Google alone paid $887 million to have their ads accepted. Then media house Axel Springer took them to court, and had itself listed as a ‘special case’, meaning its ads had to be viewable, even if they didn’t pay AdBlock Plus a fee.
This latest announcement reveals what AdBlock Plus’ end-game has been all along, but it is a big gamble. Already, the company has been forced into damage control on Twitter, stating they “…did not anticipate this backlash”. Meanwhile, scores of users are uninstalling the plugin.
Whether it makes a significant impact on users – who still have the ability to disable all ads, by the way – will be discovered in time. Regardless of its legality, there’s no denying the one-for-all approach AdBlock takes to disabling ads for the sake of revenue is ethically grey, as are many of its subscribers, who see any forms of advertising as an obstruction to their browsing experience.
For this reason, it’s ultimately up to the publishers themselves to decide what is and isn’t acceptable advertising, regardless of the money they make from it. Broader empathy for the digital audience is what will eventually make services like AdBlock redundant, but empathy certainly isn’t the industry’s strong suit.