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by nitrogen 4725 days ago
It's #3 that is evil. Unless there's a large print disclaimer sayong "notice: ad networks pay for whitelisting" in the extension description and next to thethe acceptable ads checkbox, Adblock Plus is being deceptive. The ad networks themselves should never be paying an ad blocker for special treatment. It's either bribery by the networks, or extortion by ABP.
4 comments
wallunit 4725 days ago
Ad networks doesn't pay for white listing! The article is little confusing (typical for German press). Certain ads on certain websites can get into the white list. So if somebody pays it is the company running the website. And smaller websites like Reddit got their ads even white listed for free. See my reply to Karunamon [1].

However the comment you replied to was about the accusation that Adblock Plus would be dishonest, which just isn't true.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5996565

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hcarvalhoalves 4725 days ago
This is basically the same industry spawned by spam. You pay to get your mailserver whitelisted, or risk it getting blacklisted (even if it's legitimate).

In other words, extortion.

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shardling 4725 days ago
wallunit's response was in direct response to someone who claimed this feature was "snuck in".
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pbhjpbhj 4725 days ago
I feel some charge is acceptable as the ad network needs to be assessed against the whitelist criteria.
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nitrogen 4725 days ago
But having the ad networks (or sites hosting ads) pay a charge creates misaligned incentives.
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pbhjpbhj 4725 days ago
It can. Arguably however if you agree with the premise of the whitelist as beneficial and there is a fixed schedule of charges (ie no company is preferenced in charging) then to me it seems OK.

You can't have the whitelist without having ads/networks assessed to see if they meet the criteria. Even if you crowdsourced that [which probably wouldn't be objective enough] you'd need to administrate the whitelist and so you need some revenue to cover the overheads at least. Even automating it there's a cost in creating the code. It seems right to pass that cost on and the networks are the ones holding all the money.

You could have users pay for the whitelisting to avoid "misaligned incentives".

Indeed charging the companies for assessment gives an incentive to reject them so you can charge to assess them again ... 4) profit.

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