Does Your Adblocker Think You're a Moron?

The Wall Street Journal surveys efforts to get around adblockers, particularly on iOS:

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users. In total, ads from some 700 companies meet the acceptable ads policy, an Eyeo spokesman said. Eyeo is now reaching out to developers of other ad-blocking tools to cut deals that allow certain ads to pass ads through their filters, too, in exchange for payment.

Mr. Murphy [the developer of Crystal, the number one paid app in the App Store] said he’s taken Eyeo up on its offer, and plans to implement an option within his app whereby “acceptable” ads will be displayed to users. The feature will be switched on by default, Mr. Murphy said, and he will receive a flat monthly fee from Eyeo in return. Mr. Murphy declined to disclose the fee, but said he expects to make less money from Eyeo’s payments than from sales of the app itself.

If your adblocker takes money from you in order to block ads, and then takes money from huge companies in order to show you the ads that you paid for it to block, then yes; it’s just using you to erect a tollbooth.

Previously: Welcome to the Block Party

(P.S. However! If you do want to help a small independent publisher, please whitelist us in your adblocker if you don’t mind, thanks. If not it’s cool, sorry for bothering you. ;-))

Photo by K. David Clark