Google and many others are definitely paying in order to be on the whitelist. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/over-300-businesses-...

Discussion (somewhat lacking): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11182174

* Allowing the most invasive of all the ad trackers to be members of Acceptable ads? (Criteo: Yes, they're a member)

* Allowing the most ubiquitous ad trackers to be members of Acceptable Ads? (Google: Yes, they're a member)

* Allowing the advertisements of companies owned by their investors to be members of Acceptable Ads? (Sedo: Owned by Tim Schumacher -- Yes they're a member)

* Allowing cheesy "native ads" site-spam to be part of Acceptable Ads? (Taboola. Yes, they're a member.)

* Gouging publishers for an absolutely absurd pound of flesh? (The rate is 30% of ad revenue for blocked ads. Insane!)

I could go on.

There's a lot wrong with the program.

Ref: http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/06/google-and-others-reportedl...

Criteo recently agreed to pay Eyeo 30% of revenue from ads that are allowed through. As a public company, they disclosed this to certain analysts and investors who follow them. Almost all Criteo ads are now whitelisted by ABP. >90% of ABP users keep the default settings, so that argument is a red herring in my mind. Of course, Criteo is not just showing you ads, but tracking you around the web also, in order to facilitate showing you the right ads...so the tracking domains have all been whitelisted as well.

At what point does ABP quit being an ad blocker because so many ads get through? If you don't like ads, you should switch to another adblock client. If you don't mind ads, you should just uninstall whatever you've got so that the publishers (and not yet another middleman) reap the rewards.

At the point when it becomes closed source, and its whitelisting feature cannot be disabled.

I.e. when it becomes what the submitted article essentially portrays it as.

> If you don't like ads, you should switch to another adblock client.

See "But I hate all ads!" in the FAQ:

https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

Are you telling me that 90% of people who actively sought out and installed an ad blocker did not take the time to click twice more and disable the whitelist?

I'd wager that most ABP users who have the whitelist enabled do so for ideological reasons, not laziness.

Supposedly 25% of ABP users were found to be strictly against all ads; 75% are okay with some ads to support websites.

Therefore, arguably, the whitelist feature serves the users who are in this 75% who don't want a blocker to block everything, making the browser extension useful/acceptable to more people.

> Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That's why we are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon-taboo...

> Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Taboola are paying the owner of Adblock Plus to unblock ads on their websites at a fee of "30% of the additional ad revenues" they would have made were ads unblocked, the Financial Times reports.

Umm.

Essentially we pay large postage fees for a package, the package itself being what we want and mostly unaffiliated with carriers.

So while I wouldn't turn adblock off to read an article, I understand why a publisher would want payment for their services, especially if a 3rd party is being paid and not them.

Adblock tries to strike a balance by permitting "reasonable" ads. It is hard to do and I am not sure how well they succeed but they are up front about this. This is an extension of the model described above except it tries to be a reputation broker.

Tracking by most companies has made the internet much less useful in a lot of ways. I connect to google, linked in, twitter and facebook beacons so tgey can track my preferences, then i am served the huge modal asking if I want to buy x or subscribe (or just taken to appstore out of nowhere on mobile) then the content loads but the 1/3 screen banner advert is clicked accidentally on mobile because i cant scroll.

So yes, if there was a universal $20 content fee, people would pay (and there sort of is and they sort of do) but they end up being a power broker.

Hard problem

It's a fact.Google paid millions.