AdBlock Plus: Extortion or Smart Business?

AdBlock Plus is an ad-blocking browser extension you can install to rid your Internet experience of pesky pitches. Unless the advertisers in question pay AdBlock Plus to unblock them, that is. As noted by The Financial Times, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Taboola are among those who have paid up.

What kind of game is this? Is AdBlock Plus servicing the customers or just setting up a unique proposal by becoming a gateway to otherwise inaccessible Web surfers? Here is the paragraph that got my attention: "One digital media company, which asked not to be named, said Eyeo had asked for a fee equivalent to 30 percent of the additional ad revenues that it would make from being unblocked." Eyeo makes the AdBlock Plus software, which is currently at about 300 million downloads and more than 50 million monthly active users, the FT said.

Golly, I wish I would have thought of this idea. Ad blocking is a sucker's game. Yet, what I do not want are more ads from Google and Microsoft.

I tested AdBlock Plus, and it does indeed block most ads on the Web. The coy teaser ads—the worst—are intact, as are a few other tricky ads. The product does not do much for page layouts, leaving holes here and there.

But is this good? Advertising drives the free Web. Sites such as PCMag or any of the newspapers cannot adjust the books fast enough to stay in business. The kind of advertising revenue that the printed products collected were enormous, but that is largely over. The lure of online advertising, even with mixed results, has become the thing to do.

Online advertising can't sustain the large staffing that many old print publications enjoyed. The advertising experimentation that came with it made matters worse by annoying the readers with giant pop-up ads. This evolved into elaborate Flash-based pop-ups, many unblockable at the browser level; ads that slid in and out of the frame, often for no good reason; and videos on the page that auto-play right away or after a slight delay. It's one experiment after another, some of which are still happening today.

It all began after the banner ad slowly stopped working, largely because Web users had developed "banner blindness."

It all devolved into what is called native advertising, often in the form of articles that are promotions for some item for sale. I personally think native ads are a plague, but ironically, they are probably the only good form of advertisement.

At the beginning of the modern advertising era, it was said that a good advertisement is educational and should be knowledge-based. It should tell us about the product and why it is good. Explain the benefits of the product and why people like it. Teach us something.

In fact, that is what a native ad does, which isn't a bad thing. What's bad is the fact that the publication feels the need to trick us into thinking it is not an advertisement when it is. It's typically camouflaged to look like regular content.

Then again, there is probably no other way to make sure it does not get blocked. And maybe it will keep some publications in business. One thing is for sure: the experiments continue.