Back in October we ran a story about the founding of Eyos GMBH, the new parent company for Adblock Plus that was founded by Wladimir Palant and Till Faida. And with the company came the idea to change the behavior of Adblock Plus. The managing directors back then mentioned that they had plans to fix the web for both web publishers and users.

Their decision to allow unobtrusive ads to pass through the filter was backed by a user study were 75% of all users stated that they were using an adblocker primarily to block annoying ads on the web, and that they would not mind if unobtrusive ads were displayed to them on websites.

Adblock Plus 2.0 for Firefox will introduce the concept of acceptable ads to all Firefox users who upgrade to or install the new version of the add-on. Users will see a notification once they install or update to the new version.

The notification states that Adblock Plus has been configured to allow non-intrusive advertising. Links lead to a help page with additional information about the new feature and the configuration were the feature can be turned off. The page explains the reason for the move (supporting websites that rely on advertising, forcing websites who use annoying ads to think about it), that users can disable the acceptable ads feature if they so desire, and what the developers consider acceptable ads.

According to their information, acceptable ads are static advertisements (no animations or sounds), preferably text only and use at most one script to avoid delays in page loading times.

A list of acceptable ad providers and websites is available here. The only big name in the list is Google, the remaining filters refer to ads on specific sites (mostly German based). The page states that Adblock Plus has agreements with “some websites and advertisers”. It is not clear how those agreements look like.

Adblock Plus users can disable the feature in the add-on’s Filter options.

I have to admit that I like the move as a webmaster. Why? Because I earn my living from this website with ads on the site. If everyone would block the ads on this site, I would be working in a 9 to 5 job with little or maybe no time to update and maintain this website.

Users still have the option to turn off the the exception list if the want to continue blocking all ads on the Internet.
The new version for Firefox is said to be released tomorrow. The Chrome version will receive an update in the coming months.

What’s your take on the move? Let me know in the comments.

The official announcement dates back to the last day of September 2011. It is a three paragraph announcement that the Eyeo GmbH has been founded, and that Wladimir Palant and Till Faida have become the managing directories of said company. Wladimir’s role as the lead Adblock Plus developer will remain while Till looks more at the financial well being and funding of the company.

A blog post back in August 2011 offers additional information about Wladimir’s decision to back the project by founding a company. Probably the most interesting aspect from a user perspective is that Adblock Plus has not sold out in any form. It also means that Wladimir can now work full-time on the development of Adblock Plus, which will mean faster updates than before.

It is also reassuring that the company will not put money in front of morals or ethics.

If you read the announcements carefully you will find references to “fixing” or “influencing” the web. I recently asked Till what they meant by that and he told me that the main intention of the ad blocker was to eliminate “bad” advertisement on the Internet. They do realize that the application’s current state hurts web publishers and companies who rely on advertising revenue to provide their services for free on the Internet.

A decision was made to give users an option to support their favorite websites by only blocking annoying and obtrusive ads instead of all advertisements. According to one of their studies 75% of all Adblock Plus users would like “to only block annoying ads and let unobtrusive ads go through to facilitate revenues for their favourite websites”.

Till did not fail to mention that it was the company’s “top priority to let the users decide” whether they want to continue blocking all forms of advertisements or only annoying forms.

That’s an interesting prospect from a webmaster’s point of view, considering that many rely on advertising revenue to offer their services on the Internet.

The discussion as to what is considered acceptable and what is not is publicly discussed on the Adblock Plus forum.

Adblock Plus is an extension for the Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and K-Meleon web browser.

The example below is probably not the best, as it misses other Google properties and services (like news, videos, Google places) that are usually included in the search results.

I have switched my search engine to Bing some time ago. I do have to admit though that I do not use one search engine exclusively. If I cannot find what I’m looking for on Bing, I head over to Google.com to search there. And that’s usually when I come in contact with the ads on those pages.

Removing Ads On Google

I first tried to find a userscript but there was none that was up to date in this regard. My second stop was the Firefox add-on repository where I did not find an awful lot of Google specific ad blocking solutions.

The one thing that I did not think about at first was the most obvious choice in this regard: Adblock Plus. I do not use the Firefox ad blocker as I’m perfectly fine with the NoScript add-on. NoScript on the other hand does not block the ads of the Google search engine.

After installing Adblock Plus the same search results page on Google looked like this:

All of the ads were gone, without doing any form of customization first. Perfect.

Google Chrome users can download and install a comparable solution called Adblock for Chrome. It basically does the same thing.

Alternatives

The custom Google search engine Scroogle is an alternative. It comes without the ads and tracking that users are subject to on Google. Results may not look as pretty as on Google but that’s usually not a problem.

Closing Words

It feels kinda strange that there are not more userscripts and extensions to block ads on Google, especially so if you have monitored the increasing number of ads on the search result pages.

I also know that this must sound ridiculous to some. A webmaster who earns his living from ads is advising users to block ads on Google.com. Ideally, I would hope that those of you who install or use ad blockers have the courtesy to disable those blockers on my site. I know that some of you do and I’m thankful for that.

Adblocker users can click on the icon in the left corner of the browser window in Firefox to bring up the configuration menu. Here they can select to disable the add-on on the current site.

Some of the ads on Ghacks are impression based, which means that I earn a penny or two even if you do not click on them or interact with them in another way.

The first extension to block advertisement has been around for a while but the installation has changed with the official release of Google Chrome 2. Adsweep can be compared to the popular Firefox add-on Adblock Plus. Google Chrome 2.x users need to download the file AdSweep.user.js from the official AdSweep website. They then need to create a directory with the name User Scripts in their user profile. Windows XP and Windows Vista users find the Google Chrome profile folder in the following default locations:

Windows XP user profile directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Windows Vista user profile directory:

C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

Google Chrome needs to be started with a parameter to enable userscripts. This can be best done by adding the parameter to the shortcut of the Google Browser. A right-click on the shortcut will open the shortcut properties of the browser. The parameter –enable-user-scripts needs to be added at the end of the Target field in the Shortcut tab.

The complete command to launch Google Chrome with extensions would then look like the following:

"c:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --enable-user-scripts

The website of the Adsweep developers contains additional information to add the parameter to the shell command when opening websites this way.

Update: Google in the meantime has updated the browser’s extension engine. Extensions run natively now. One of the most popular ad blocking extensions for Chrome is Adblocker Plus, developed by the makers of the popular Firefox extension of the same name. It can be downloaded and installed directly from the Chrome Web Store.