The problem with AdBlock Plus is that, as far as I can tell, the way to get on their "unobtrusive ads" list isn't to actually be "unobtrusive" to any meaningful standard, it's to pay them to qualify you as unobtrusive.

That's not my experience with ABP. So far I haven't found any actually obtrusive ads and as far as I am concerned, they are holding up a good standard.

That doesn't have anything to do with experience, that's just a fact. Advertisers pay ABP to get on the list.

Yeah but that doesn't change the fact about the requirements to even be able to pay to get on the list.

It's a trust issue in summary. You either trust them to do a good job at screening or not.

IIRC, you pay them (not a lot) to check out your ads and verify that they are, in fact, unobtrusive. I realize it's distasteful that money changes hands at all, but I can imagine it takes a non-trivial amount of person-hours to vet these things on a large scale, and it should be easy enough to tell if they're crooked or not just by using ABP and seeing if the permitted ads are intrusive.

When I used it (until after their ad whitelisting came in), I found that they did a poor job of blocking obtrusive ads, then. Either that, or their standards for "unobtrusive" were low.

I switched to a better adblocker, so now I just whitelist sites whose ads I'm willing to see.