Well, this is puzzling. The popular ad blocking tool, Adblock Plus, is launching an advertising platform for showing whitelisted ads.
On Tuesday, Adblock Plus announced the new Acceptable Ads Platform that will be controlled by an independent committee and will be effective to show ads that are nonintrusive.
Adblock Plus is a popular browser extension for blocking annoying online ads
The process to whitelist ads will be made transparent, allowing publishers to drag and drop ads pre-approved by the Acceptable Ads initiative. The popular browser extension has teamed with publisher platform-provider ComboTag to create a marketplace of whitelisted ads that publishers and bloggers can use.
The beta version of the platform contains ad placements that follow the criteria for size and labeling. Publishers can take advantage of the ad platform by just integrating a single tag into their page.
Soon the ad-tech platform will offer a feedback mechanism embedded in each ad, which will allow users to rate the ads they see. This feedback will then figure into which ads get selected on a live auction.
The co-founder of Adblock Plus, Til Faida, in a press statement clarified that the platform was created to help publishers benefit by showing an alternative, nonintrusive ad experience to users.
Adblock Plus is incredibly popular with more than 200 million users worldwide. For years, the digital industry has been fighting to stop the ad blocker, with several millions lost in revenue. For many small time bloggers and mid-size news agencies, ads are the only source of revenue.
While the Acceptable Ads Platform is a welcome sign for publishers, Adblock Plus users can still choose to turn-off the feature.
“We’ve been waiting years for the ad-tech industry to do something consumer-friendly like this, so finally we got tired of waiting and decided to just do it ourselves,” says Faida.
The Acceptable Ads Platform functions as both Supply-Side Platform (SSP) and ad exchange. The beta is open today for both publishers and advertisers.