Adblock Plus Parent Company Eyeo GmbH Founded
Eyeo GmbH, the company behind Adblock Plus, was recently founded by Wladimir Palant, the technologies lead developer, and Till Faida. The move from a community driven part-time project to a company backed project (still community driven) is certainly something that existing and future Adblock Plus users would like to know more about, hence the article.
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.
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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 websitesâ€
Dream on. I have feeling that Adblock founder wants to cash in and pass ads from companies that are willing to pay to him.
I asked them about that directly and they firmly stated that they would never do that.
boris, why do you have that feeling?
@Boris: ABP only works because there are so many people (filterlist authors, translators etc.) donating their time to our course – if we started to put money over the product’s integrity we sure would lose their support and the project would not survive very long.
Still, I fail to see exactly the objective reason behind that move. Are there ways for author to make money whilst the user’s privacy and the add-on’s efficiency will both remain untouched?
Don’t get me wrong… I’m not whining here and I don’t disagree. Simply, I’d like further clarification. Although, I’m sure, if something will go terribly wrong, the community will make it widely known.