In fairness, they don't just whitelist any old ad, there's ostensibly a review and guidelines that must be followed, but at the end of the day, it's still a colossal conflict of interest.
I don't see any evidence that he's being paid to whitelist ads on various websites. It could simply be that the site operators are agreeing to meet certain criteria for 'non-annoying' ads, and will be de-listed if they breach that agreement.
Now, I'm not a user of Acceptable Ads, but I don't think either their specific policy of taking money to whitelist AA-compliant ads from large companies, or having that policy apply to entities that have otherwise scummy ads is necessarily dishonest.
Maybe, but AB+'s acceptable ads program does not whitelist "acceptable ads", it whitelists "acceptable ads who have paid AB+ 30% of their ad revenue". Bonus points for the obvious conflict of interest of AB+ privately determining what "acceptable" means (where remember, if they say yes they make money).
AB+ "acceptable ads" exists to solicit bribes from websites to display their ads.
After reading the article, I feel like the Acceptable Ads program is a little more complicated than the "extortion" some are calling it. The tiered scheme where "small websites" can apply for free and only "larger properties" pay seems like it could be a reasonable way of dealing with the financial overhead of maintaining the list if it's run fairly and transparently; that transparency seems to be lacking at the moment, but that may be changing soon ("We’re inviting a completely independent review board to take over, enforce and oversee our Acceptable Ads initiative").
Vetted or acceptable ads is a fake narrative - a smokescreen - it's just a way for these adblock apps to extort ad networks for a payout. In the article it mentions that hundreds of companies including all the big search and display networks, and all of the big native ad networks, are included on the whitelist. Who is left?
I had no idea ABP accepted money from advertisers to be put on their whitelist. I know they have to make money somehow but this just seems suspiciously like extortion to me.
Yeah but if the adserver is a black box that's managed by the ad network I would have thought the website could pass the liability on to them (and state this in their ToS somewhere)
- Acceptable Ads is not supposed to allow scummy ads
- Taboola paid to get their ads accepted
- Acceptable Ads is dishonest
If you google a bit, you'll find that the ads that get whitelisted under Acceptable Ads are nothing different from the normal Taboola bullshit. In fact, the whitelist is quite simple: They allow the whole taboola network to operate.
By "legal" do you mean within the service agreement? It's probably not, but this isn't something that should be illegal. Ad networks should have realized on day one their business model was stupid and payout shouldn't be based on views and clicks.
This seems to be an inherent problem with the ad network model.
You've got 3 or 4 different parties involved in the current ad system: The content publisher who host the ads, the ad network, the advertisers, and, possibly, the company the advertiser hires to write the ad. And it's not like old school print ads where the content publisher gets to look over a proof before everything gets sent out. Several of these parties either don't or can't really understand how the ads really work and what the final product is going to be like.
In this kind of situation, whose responsibility is it to maintain integrity and keep the bad actors out? I'm not sure that it's anybody's. _Maybe_ it's the ad network's, but, realistically, they're sitting on top of an immensely complex system that is going to be very hard to police properly, so they won't spend the money on it unless they're forced to.
I suspect that the only way to force them to do it is to have a court find that an ad network hosting a malignant ad is either tortious, or makes them an accessory to a crime.
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