Ad Exchange Launched by Ad Block Company

"Acceptable Ads Platform"

[engine]

Users with the Adblock Plus software installed will soon get ads, but, it's described as acceptable ads.
It also seems Google is involved in this, although that's hardly surprising as ad blocking must be one of its biggest fears.

Google Inc. and ad tech specialist AppNexus will also have a hand in helping to sell ad space from the new platform, by offering it up to potential buyers through their own online ad exchanges.

All of the companies in the chain, including Eyeo, ComboTag, Google and AppNexus will take a cut of the revenue generated from the ads they help to sell and place on publishers’ sites through the program. The remainder will be passed to publishers, Eyeo said.

In a statement, Google said, “We review the validity and quality of inventory made available on our platform, but have no knowledge of ComboTag or Eyeo’s SSP arrangements.” Ad Exchange Launched by Ad Block Company [wsj.com]

[creeking]

I think it's time for a free open-source ad blocker. or does that already exist?

[mack]

So, what makes one add "acceptable"? My ads are way more acceptable than yours, no my ads are far superior. Taste is relative, even when it comes to online advertising.

R.E. open-source ad blocker? Nice idea!

Mack.

[breeks]

Just another spoon in the ever shrinking publisher pie.

ComboTag, Google, and AppNexus,adblocker will take a cut of the revenue, ......

[trebuchet]

Adblockers started off as open source projects. Then they realised they had ad networks over a barrel, so they got greedy and started milking them. This just seems to be a continuation of that.

Their definition of an "acceptable ad" is a static text or image ad placed outside the content and clearly labelled as advertising. No pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, hover effects, autoplay, etc.

[robzilla]

ComboTag, Google, and AppNexus,adblocker will take a cut of the revenue, ......

Not quite...

Google and AppNexus: We're not involved with the surprise Adblock Plus plan to sell ads [uk.businessinsider.com]

But it turns out that Google and AppNexus never agreed to any sort of partnership with Adblock Plus.

Both AppNexus and Google's AdX were ComboTag's sole demand partners, but they're not participating in the new platform.

In fact, AppNexus served ComboTag and its associated ad network Shefa Media notice of termination on Tuesday, following the Acceptable Ads Platform announcement which implied its apparent involvement. AppNexus told Business Insider it would not have agreed to work with Adblock Plus because it views the Eyeo business model as extortion.

[Libre]

An ad-blocker that does not block ads. A very interesting business model.
At least its interesting to see how many people uninstall Adblock Plus on the moment they are going to see ads!

[jambam]

Should just rename it.... Adblock plus ads.

[super70s]

Their definition of an "acceptable ad" is a static text or image ad placed outside the content and clearly labelled as advertising. No pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, hover effects, autoplay, etc.

Which is easy to control if your site is relatively small (like, say, the AdBlocker Plus site/blog). If you have a big site with thousands of pages you're expected to review every ad on every page to make sure you're not in violation, forcing many to just throw up their hands.

[AlexDarling]

RE: open source ad blocker. Try uBlock Origin, no pre-created whitelist & slightly less resource intensive: [en.wikipedia.org...]

The "Acceptable Ads" standard is one I could agree to in theory - it's about making advertisements obvious without ruining a user's experience. But serving ads with your ad-blocking plugin is a breach of consumer trust. I also don't think AdBlock Plus is transparent enough to be the group that defines what is "acceptable" and what isn't. I want consumer-facing change, but not like this.

[smilie]

>> @trebuchet: Adblockers started off as open source projects. Then they realised they had ad networks over a barrel, so they got greedy and started milking them.

It actually looks completely opposite of what you wrote, "have poor SEs and ad networks over a barrel"

You're missing the first step. Or several.

Search Engines started taking website's content like it's theirs and putting ads on it. Then they got greedy and started milking it in an order of tens of billions of dollars.

Then Search Engines got super greedy and started lowering webmaster payouts, user targeting and other tactics to make yet more money.

The SE >> webmaster relationship got destroyed.
The SE >> visitors relationship got destroyed.

As webmasters came up with nothing due to various very well squashed things such as no real discussions on this forum.

Then Visitors came up with an Adblocker.

Was a natural progression of SE's super greed.

[smilie]

@breeks: Just another spoon in the ever shrinking publisher pie.

We as webmasters need to come up with ways to protect our content , including images. From SE bandits.
They are the ones taking it and making hand over fist while paying us peanuts.

Visitors already came up with Adblocker, you really can't browse the web anymore without it. As SEs will corrupt it, there will be other, yet not corrupted adblocks.

Webmasters need a solution to a SE super greed too.

[ergophobe]

uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger = no pay to play schemes and no tracking

[trebuchet]

@smillie, you seem to be suggesting that Google's nefarious practices forced poor struggling web publishers to slather ads all over their sites, thus giving rise to adblocking. I've been around long enough to know that wasn't the case. Garish and imprudent use of online advertising was around long before Google's content-raiding. Adblocking was fuelled by dissatisfaction with the end product. It's publishers (or, more correctly, some publishers) who must carry the can for that.

[EditorialGuy]

Garish and imprudent use of online advertising was around long before Google's content-raiding. Adblocking was fuelled by dissatisfaction with the end product. It's publishers (or, more correctly, some publishers) who must carry the can for that.

Yes, I remember the "banner ad networks" of the 1990s that spewed out all kinds of junk ads: pop-ups, pop-unders, fake Windows error messages, you name it.

Google's AdSense network didn't come along until 2003, long after the commercialization of the Web had begun (and several years after the "dot-com" bubble had burst).

[smilie]

@trebuchet ,

You seem to suggest that when my content and images are copied and made billions on, and then my Adsense payout is 1/6 of what it was 5-6 years ago, somehow it's my fault?

That's an interesting point of view that I disagree with.

You guys as webmaster community failed to hold off the beast at bay. They are praying on our content now making billions , while website owners are are dying breed - unless you count a short lived fame of Facebook sites etc. where you don't even own content. - and btw regular folks don't even bother with separate websites anymore, no easy way to make it.

We need to come up with our own rules that will facilitate this:
1) pay us decent amount for our content, and
2) prevent web saturation with ads.
whether it will be software or a legal framework that will force ad networks to openly publish payouts.

Then there won't be any Adblocker issues.

On one of my large site I heavily promote non-Google browsers and Adblockers to a forum community. I really don't care anymore if I earn $300 or $200 from that site, it's all a relative 0. But I am sending a strong message back. Hopefully it is going to be viewed by tens of thousands of visitors. Adblocker is our only way to fight back against greed of SEs.

[trebuchet]

You seem to suggest that when my content and images are copied and made billions on, and then my Adsense payout is 1/6 of what it was 5-6 years ago, somehow it's my fault?

Not at all. I'm suggesting it's a separate problem that is largely unconnected with adblocking. It's not that I don't agree with your concerns; I agree with much of it and I'm sure others here do too. It's just that we're talking chicken and you want to complain about turkey.

As I said before, adblocking is a user-based phenomenon that responds to poor advertising/UI standards and privacy concerns. You might see it as a device for 'getting even' with commercial greed or SE manipulation - but I don't think the vast majority of people install adblockers for those reasons.

Personally I think that promoting adblockers is going to harm other compliant publishers a lot more than it will harm Google.

[EditorialGuy]

You seem to suggest that when my content and images are copied and made billions on, and then my Adsense payout is 1/6 of what it was 5-6 years ago, somehow it's my fault?

I'm not trebuchet, but I'd point out that the ad business has changed enormously over the last half-dozen years or so. Programmatic ad buying, for example, has made media buying far more efficient and has exerted downward pressure on CPM and RPM.

As recently as 2010, our rep firm was begging for all the inventory it could get to sell ads for [topic] at CPMs of US$20 and higher. (That firm is now out of business, by the way.)

[EditorialGuy]

Re ad blockers getting into the ad business: This sounds like a huge conflict of interest. (Which shouldn't be surprising, when you consider that demanding "pay to play" from major companies like Google to circumvent ad blocking has a strong smell of extortion.)

[engine]

The irony of ad blockers carrying adverts has been around for some time.

Look at the facts behind some of the drivers for this: It's not Google, it's the publishers that run over-intrusive adverts that has driven this. Those "punch the monkey" ads of the past were annoying, but nothing like the problems when visiting some publisher's web sites.
This is one reason why the I.A.B. laid out plans for L.E.A.N. scoring. [webmasterworld.com] L.E.A.N. is Light, Encrypted, AdChoice supported, and Non-invasive ads

It's a commercial world, and "we" should be looking at is how to make money from this, whether it be from our ad supported, through for example, AdSense.

It sounds to me as if it's going to be a tougher option unless we can get revenue sharing.

[Libre]

@engine, I use ad-blocker/widgets-blocker only because of the privacy concerns, and many persons I know have starting to use it for that reason.

[engine]

Libre, that's a good point, however, i'm not sure anyone here is a normal surfer, if there's such a thing.

Tracking has gotten out of hand and is probably going to come more to the fore as people realise what's going on. I watched someone download an app the other day and they didn't even look at the "access" warnings the app wanted, they just clicked to accept. It'll take time before it sinks in to the mass audience.

Intrusive ads, OTOH, are extremely visible.

[creeking]

Tracking has gotten out of hand

hmmm. does adblocker do tracking?

where is my tin-foil hat?

[engine]

hmmm. does adblocker do tracking?

Well, any ad that is delivered to a user could, potentially, track the user to a lesser or greater extent.

I was actually thinking more of mobile operating systems tracking users.

[Broadway]

Is the AMP version of ads any less intrusive or have L.E.A.N. characteristics? I still wonder if AMP isn't a way where we're all guided into a new standard that's more acceptable to all parties involved.

[netmeg]

I haven't read up on Ad Block Plus, but I think either they've relaxed some of their restrictions already or some ad networks have figured out a work around. My mother has it installed on her computer, and she noticed that in the past week she started seeing video ads in places she never saw ads at all before (like on Slate, for example)

[Terius]

Garish and imprudent use of online advertising was around long before Google's content-raiding. Adblocking was fuelled by dissatisfaction with the end product. It's publishers (or, more correctly, some publishers) who must carry the can for that.

Adsense actually tried to slow that down by limiting how many ads people could place on sites. After smart phones came along, some of the big ad-driven sites started putting more and more ads on their pages. This flooded the market with billions of ad impressions, which drove down the price. So they'd add more ad slots to try to make it up, thus driving the prices down further. After about 5 years of this, they finally stopped adding more ads, and the prices bottomed out and started to rise again. Small publishers were forced to put just as many ads on their own sites, or find another way to make money.

Consumers are pretty tolerant of many ads, as long as they aren't intrusive. Going forward, the trick will be getting marketers to realize intrusive ads just aren't worth the adblock tradeoff. They need to work toward finding a saturation point where the ads aren't annoying people enough to bother with ad blocking software.

[IanCP]

Consumers are pretty tolerant of many ads, as long as they aren't intrusive

Most people I have discussed ads with were not seriously concerned with the ads themselves - some claimed ad blindness.

What gets up people's back were the accompanying scripts, and the tracking - real or imagined.

Most people really wanted zero data gathering of their internet surfing habits. One fellow told me he could remember the days of .gif or .jpg ads with an accompanying affiliate link. He knew full well that - in his words - "those sites relied upon affiliate links to pay for the site costs, with a few cups of coffee left over".

It seems to me, for most people the ads aren't the problem, it's the data gathering. Compare the html file of a news site say twenty years ago, with a similar size article today from that same site. The actual article content is only a mere fraction of the file size - what is the rest of it for?

[ergophobe]

I haven't read up on Ad Block Plus

Ad Block Plus has long been a pay-to-play system - it blocks ads unless you pay them money. They are the mafia of the internet.

What gets up people's back were the accompanying scripts, and the tracking

Strange experience - I was *in* an ad. It sensitized me to how aggressive the tracking and regargeting was. I would go to pages on a topic unrelated to the ad and unrelated to my normal interests and see two and occasionally three versions of the ad. Very weird experience. After a week of seeing how far and wide I was tracked, I added uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to my browsers. It was the last straw.

The other concern for me is bandwidth. For a long, long time, I paid by the GB for my bandwidth ($9/GB) and these ads can be 50% of traffic. It would actually be cheaper for me to pay the publisher directly the amount they make per page view than to pay the bandwidth cost! As of a couple of weeks ago, I finally got unlimited bandwidth, but I still have a slow connection by any 21st-century standard and so the wasted bandwidth is actually a major concern for me.

It sounds to me as if it's going to be a tougher option unless we can get revenue sharing.

I would like to see some arrangement similar to affiliate marketing where, in lieu of an affiliate network, you have a publisher network that works as a broker and takes a percentage. You fill up your account with money, install the browser extension and get ad-free access to all the sites in their network for $0.02/pageview. The publishers would make more money and users would have a better experience.

This is not so far off from what Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube Red are doing with video.

[Terius]

It seems to me, for most people the ads aren't the problem, it's the data gathering. Compare the html file of a news site say twenty years ago, with a similar size article today from that same site. The actual article content is only a mere fraction of the file size - what is the rest of it for?

Good point, and great question. My understanding is that most of it is tracking scripts designed to help marketers know what really works, and display ads only to the exact visitors who are likely to react. But in discussions with the people who write these scripts, I get the sense that many of them are redundant or pointless. In over a decade of all this tracking, the marketing world has not learned much they didn't already know from print and TV advertising.

But part of the problem is that Google isn't from the marketing world. They didn't come into Adsense already knowing what marketers knew from decades of print and TV advertising. They promised a holy grail of marketing wisdom through tracking. In over a decade of ad tracking, what Google has taught us is stuff marketers already knew: it's not as simple as "person sees commercial, drops everything, rushes to buy product." They think it over. They talk to friends. They consider your branding - do you only ever try to sell them something, or do you also come across as funny, hip, cool, or sharing their values? And women are responsible for most purchases, because they still do a lot of buying for families as well as themselves. We already knew all this back in the 90s and earlier. Now, IMH and possibly totally wrong O, all internet marketers need to be tracking is stuff that's specific to the internet, like geolocation (you don't air a TV commercial or print ad in a market you can't serve, so it makes sense not to pay for clicks in countries you don't ship to).