Adblock Plus will embrace 'acceptable' ads

Rather than saving you from seeing ads when you visit websites in the future, Adblock Plus will instead serve up “acceptable” ads.

Adblock Plus will replace ads that it deems to be too big, ugly, or intrusive with ads that are smaller and less annoying. It will utilise an ad marketplace, which will allow blog and website operators to pick acceptable ads to place on their pages.

When a visitor using Adblock Plus visits this page, they’ll be shown one of these acceptable ads instead of what the site would usually attempt to display.

Adblock Plus’ operations and communications director, Ben Williams, said, “It allows you to treat the two different ecosystems completely differently and monetise each one. And crucially, monetise the ad blockers on their own terms.”

Publishers will get 80% of ad revenue from marketplace ads, though they are still unlikely to be too pleased with the arrangement. These ads will likely be less valuable than ones that the publisher would otherwise display, for example.

Williams counters this argument by saying, “Ad blocking would have happened with or without us. What we were able to do is try and reverse the spread of 100 percent black-and-white ad blocking, blocking everything ... Acceptable ads was a pivot toward what we think is better.”

It’s not only publishers who could be aggrieved by this. Those using Adblock Plus may be a little shocked to see ads on websites, regardless of how “acceptable” they’re deemed to be.