AppId is over the quota
In December, however, Adblock Plus introduced a new concept, the “acceptable ad” — that is, an ad so inoffensive that it shouldn’t necessarily be blocked by the software. And nothing has been quite so simple since.
Under a new default setting for all users of Adblock Plus, these online ads will appear. (A user can still opt out with a couple of clicks and block all ads as before.)
For purists among the community of users and programmers who support the open-source project, “acceptable ad” has the ring of doublespeak, as in, “all ads are equal, but some ads are more equal than others.”
They have raged on online forums, including those hosted by the Adblock Plus project itself, and in comment areas at tech Web sites like Slashdot. While some have couched their concerns within long notes about their affection for the project, others, like “felix,” kept it short: “?‘acceptable ads’ is an oxymoron ... i accept no ads. you fail; goodbye.” There has been a movement proposing to “fork” the project — that is, run a version of Adblock Plus before the changes, as is allowed for open-source projects.
Adblock Plus’s lead developer, Wladimir Palant, has tried to quell the anger, replying personally to the disappointed commenters and explaining that the introduction of “acceptable ads” is true to his vision for the ad-blocking project. The project was never meant to rid the Internet of all advertising, he says, but of annoying advertising.
“We feel that the original ‘kill all’ approach isn’t productive here; we need to start differentiating between ads and giving people better ways to allow some of them,” Mr. Palant, who lives in Cologne, Germany, wrote in an e-mail.
Last August, he created a company, Eyeo, with the backing of an unnamed private investor, and a managing director, Till Faida, who also lives in Cologne. The company pays Mr. Faida and Mr. Palant’s salaries, along with the salary of another programmer based in Moscow. (For years, Mr. Palant had worked on the project on the side.)
Eyeo, whose only product is Adblock Plus, has a motto that alludes to its bigger aspirations: “We want to make the Internet better for everyone. Purging bad ads is a good way to start.”
Mr. Faida has left open the possibility that some big Web sites will pay his start-up as part of the new service; small sites will never be charged, he said. In an e-mail, he wrote: “In the long term, we of course have to think about how to make our movement sustainable — including larger Web sites that will increase their revenues by partnering with us in the costs of maintaining the project seems to be a way that will work.”
In an interview, Mr. Faida focused on the plight of those smaller Web sites that had suffered collateral damage from ad-blocking programs. While the programs can seem like niche products, they can really affect the revenue for Web sites, he said. He estimated that in the United States 3.5 percent of all Internet users have Adblock Plus installed; in Germany, where use of the Firefox browser is higher, it is 12 percent.
“I just talked to a tech Web site here in Germany, they have seven employees and 40 percent of their users have ad-blockers,” he said. “There was a tech convention in America, and they couldn’t afford to send more than one journalist because so many of their ads are being blocked.”
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