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A couple years ago, on top of their acceptable ads program that was more or less pay-to-bypass, Eeyo announced that it was going to start an ad exchange to let

A couple years ago, on top of their acceptable ads program that was more or less pay-to-bypass, Eeyo announced that it was going to start an ad exchange to let people buy placements on spots that ABP blocked. In effect ABP was forcing itself in as a middle man and taking a fee from both the site owner and the advertiser. As an example, if I, your local newspaper, sell a placement to your local car dealership, ABP comes in and says "people won't see the car ads, but if you split the revenue you were going to get with me, I'll sell those placements to someone else for you." So let's say 10% of my visitors use ABP. I can now either lose it or get back some smaller percentage of it by paying ABP. That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. In addition, when Eeyo made that announcement, they also announced that they were working with AppNexus and Google on the new exchange, which just wasn't true. Though I believe Google does pay to get some ads into the acceptable ads program. If you're going to be in the business of blocking ads, stay out of the business of selling ads.

mindslight 9y ago
> That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render. The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  > In the reality of the web I'm willing to concede that I assume a specific view of the nature of ad spots, but you're going to have to reeeeeeaaaaally stretch your argument to claim that this is the reality of the web. For the vast majority of people the browser is the renderer that happens to be customizable, not the arbiter of what is rendered, regardless of the browser's capability to decide. Regardless, you don't have to accept the online advertising business model, even at a moral level, to acknowledge the shadiness of the other aspects of the practice that I pointed out.

mindslight 9y ago

> That's one DDoS short of a digital protection racket. Your specific condemnation rests on this tired narrative that "ad spots" are something belonging to the site owner. In the reality of the web, it's all the user's display area - the user agent decides what and how to render. The real critique is that the software is working against the user's interest for its own gain. This is par for the course of proprietary software, but generally seen as unsustainable poor taste in the Free world. Fortunately, having achieved the activation energy of installing extensions for one's self, switching is not hard.

munchbunny 9y ago
> In the reality of the web I'm willing to concede that I assume a specific view of the nature of ad spots, but you're going to have to reeeeeeaaaaally stretch your argument to claim that this is the reality of the web. For the vast majority of people the browser is the renderer that happens to be customizable, not the arbiter of what is rendered, regardless of the browser's capability to decide. Regardless, you don't have to accept the online advertising business model, even at a moral level, to acknowledge the shadiness of the other aspects of the practice that I pointed out.