4 ms·

In tandem with their Better Ads enforcement, Google will also launch a companion program, Funding Choices, that will enable CBA-compliant sites to ask Chrome us

by tensor 9y ago

In tandem with their Better Ads enforcement, Google will also launch a companion program, Funding Choices, that will enable CBA-compliant sites to ask Chrome users with content blockers to whitelist their site and unblock their ads. Should the user refuse, they can either pay for an "ad-free experience" or be locked out by a publisher's adblock wall. Does this mean that Chrome will be directly supporting anti-adblock technology? Will it somehow just disable extensions like ublock on these CBA supported sites?

petre 9y ago
This is just like paying protection tax to the mob.
derefr 9y ago
Key part of the quote: > publisher's adblock wall The publisher is the one responsible for using a mixture of Javascript and server-log analysis to detect ad-blocking users and prevent them from accessing the content. As already happens on a growing number of sites. The change here is that Chrome will now notice when a publisher has served a user a "please disable your adblock for this site to continue" wall (maybe Google will suggest such pages be sent as HTTP 402 responses?) and do something on the browser-chrome level to give users the additional option: using a Google payments system built into Chrome to send the publisher a one-time [micro?]payment in exchange for unlocking that one article, without having to disable their adblocker. (Of course, many ad-supported publishers also already have ad-free subscriptions that you could sign up for—but they don't tend to bother with one-off per-article micropayments, because going through the whole giving-out-your-credit-card-to-a-web-form flow isn't worth it to read one article. This would avoid that problem.) Funny coincidence: I pitched this exact thing in the form of a browser extension to a VC firm a few years ago.

4 ms·

In tandem with their Better Ads enforcement, Google will also launch a companion program, Funding Choices, that will enable CBA-compliant sites to ask Chrome us

by tensor 9y ago

petre 9y ago
This is just like paying protection tax to the mob.
derefr 9y ago
Key part of the quote: > publisher's adblock wall The publisher is the one responsible for using a mixture of Javascript and server-log analysis to detect ad-blocking users and prevent them from accessing the content. As already happens on a growing number of sites. The change here is that Chrome will now notice when a publisher has served a user a "please disable your adblock for this site to continue" wall (maybe Google will suggest such pages be sent as HTTP 402 responses?) and do something on the browser-chrome level to give users the additional option: using a Google payments system built into Chrome to send the publisher a one-time [micro?]payment in exchange for unlocking that one article, without having to disable their adblocker. (Of course, many ad-supported publishers also already have ad-free subscriptions that you could sign up for—but they don't tend to bother with one-off per-article micropayments, because going through the whole giving-out-your-credit-card-to-a-web-form flow isn't worth it to read one article. This would avoid that problem.) Funny coincidence: I pitched this exact thing in the form of a browser extension to a VC firm a few years ago.