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Making money off of ad blocking, via donation or not, is ethically dubious; it's a bit like ads on torrent sites, which I also find unacceptable. Both situation

Making money off of ad blocking, via donation or not, is ethically dubious; it's a bit like ads on torrent sites, which I also find unacceptable. Both situations financially profit off of someone else's intellectual property without compensating the owner. Further, the whole "acceptable ads" thing is extortion, and any ad-blocker that engages in that should be removed from stores. It's criminal behaviour, plain and simple.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago
Is there any honest, legitimate way to do the "acceptable ads" thing? I agree that having the adblocker creator charge for entry is ethically dubious, but I actually want to see non-invasive ads; I believe that conscientious advertising is actually the most benevolent way for the typical website to fund itself,* and I want to encourage that sort of good behavior. At the moment, though, I pretty much have to build the "good advertiser" list myself, and that's not really practical or scalable. Is there any way to incentivize a global "acceptable ads" list that isn't super sketchy? *Subscriptions are exclusionary, donations often aren't enough, merchandising isn't practical for many sites, sponsored content and advertorials are obviously reprehensible...am I missing anything?
- yuhong 11y ago
  I think a good starting point is to divide ads into categories/sets, with a good default being ad network ads I think.
- interpol_p 11y ago
  The honest way would be to simply not charge for unblocking. If it's being done by a party whose only interest is to see better ads on the web, then that seems honest to me.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Yes, this is an interesting question. Exclude all non-static ads (flash/etc). Get the whole size of the ad (and associated JS) and the information it collects from the user and 'vote' based on that Different users might have different levels of what's acceptable to them. The ideal way would be to show more of the 'best' ads and none of the worse, but of course for that you would have to show ads. Maybe some adblocker could allow for 'voting' of ads

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

Is there any honest, legitimate way to do the "acceptable ads" thing? I agree that having the adblocker creator charge for entry is ethically dubious, but I actually want to see non-invasive ads; I believe that conscientious advertising is actually the most benevolent way for the typical website to fund itself,* and I want to encourage that sort of good behavior. At the moment, though, I pretty much have to build the "good advertiser" list myself, and that's not really practical or scalable. Is there any way to incentivize a global "acceptable ads" list that isn't super sketchy? *Subscriptions are exclusionary, donations often aren't enough, merchandising isn't practical for many sites, sponsored content and advertorials are obviously reprehensible...am I missing anything?

yuhong 11y ago
I think a good starting point is to divide ads into categories/sets, with a good default being ad network ads I think.
interpol_p 11y ago
The honest way would be to simply not charge for unblocking. If it's being done by a party whose only interest is to see better ads on the web, then that seems honest to me.
raverbashing 11y ago
Yes, this is an interesting question. Exclude all non-static ads (flash/etc). Get the whole size of the ad (and associated JS) and the information it collects from the user and 'vote' based on that Different users might have different levels of what's acceptable to them. The ideal way would be to show more of the 'best' ads and none of the worse, but of course for that you would have to show ads. Maybe some adblocker could allow for 'voting' of ads