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Tech

AdBlock Plus Hosted a ‘Camp David’ to Help End the AdBlock Wars

Attendees worked to help decide the future of the Acceptable Ads Committee.
Rachel Pick
New York, US

AdBlock Plus organized a "Camp David" style summit a few days ago that brought advertisers and publishers together to discuss the contentious future of adblocking.

First, AdBlock Plus presented attendees with the idea that users would be able to help them define what constituted an "intrusive" ad, and ads deemed intrusive would not run. Acceptable Ads has already barred a lot of annoying ads, but this new development gives users more input.

But mainly, AdBlock Plus wanted "unvarnished advice on how we should formulate the new Acceptable Ads Committee, which will take over the Acceptable Ads initiative sometime next year." The move to turn leadership of Acceptable Ads to a board outside of Eyeo, the maker of AdBlock Plus, has been controversial.

So what's come out of the talks? AdBlock Plus says nothing in their blog post is finalized, but they're thinking of having an independent nonprofit oversee the Acceptable Ads Committee. They also want to make sure the committee has representatives from different areas of the issue: publishers, advertisers, journalists, tech companies, and so on. And they said they heard a lot of suggestions about improving transparency which they plan to take into consideration.

Through people have been using adblockers for years, the issue hadn't really come to a head until this year, when adblocking browsers became available for use on smartphones. That seemed to be the last straw. Publishers like newspapers and magazines, trying to stay solvent in a long-beleaguered industry, know that pop-up ads suck but depend upon them for revenue. But adblockers prevent more than just annoyance, they also block malware, making them a useful tool for any Internet user.