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.