In a newly published blog post, AdBlock explains how it manages online advertisements, and details the source of the revenues that keep it running. Spoiler alert: from whitelisted ads.
Acceptable Ads is a part of the AdBlock Plus package and it allows ads to bypass filters, provided they meet certain criteria. Apart from matching a set of predefined rules, the companies that want to be excluded from the filters need to pay AdBlock a sum of money.
AdBlock Plus puts a high price on transparency, so it revealed in great detail the visual standards for acceptable ads, the price companies have to pay for whitelisting their online marketing hooks, and how some companies can get whitelisted for free.
"We are able to keep our open source product free by charging large entities a fee for whitelisting services," the blog entry reads. It also points out that the rest of 90 percent of partners get the service free of charge.
So, what qualifies a firm as a "large entity"?
AdBlock Plus considers large entities as websites with more than 10 million ad impressions, thanks to being whitelisted. The fee for them is a solid 30 percent of the revenues registered after whitelisting.
Whether you own a paying or non-paying webpage, in order to get whitelisted you will need to follow the Acceptable Advertising criteria. Maintaining its love for transparency, the company has just updated the criteria and explained it soon after. To make the grade, those interested should educate themselves on ads' preferred placements, sizes and appearance.
Concerns also shadowed AdBlock Plus' actions: on one hand, the company delivers a product that protects clients from unwanted ads, and on the other it crafts a nifty list of exceptions.
The company made it clear that the following types of online marketing are unacceptable and it will continue blocking them: rich media ads, pre-roll video ads, ads that visibly load new ads when the Primary Content does not change, animated ads, autoplay-sound or video ads, ads with excessive or non-user-initiated hover effects, expanding ads, generally oversized image ads, interstitial page ads, overlay ads, overlay in-video ads, pop-unders and pop-ups.
To see how users feel about the Acceptable Advertising program, AdBlock Plus conducted a survey that returned surprising results.
"75 percent replied that they would accept some advertising to help support websites," AdBlock said.
If indeed such a majority of Internet users show flexibility about online advertising, this brings hope to publishers who rely on ads to fund their content creation.
