Adblock plus creators Eyeo are getting more serious in the fight against adblock circumvention companies. They created an interdisciplinary team internally to counter the ad block blockers.
Eyeo wants the team to work alongside with publishers to come up with user-friendly solutions to combat the adblock circumvention tech. What they really want is for publishers to sign up for their acceptable ads whitelist, to them is the only official way to circumvent adblock, but to sign up for the whitelist publishers have to pay for this service.
Essentially they want to battle circumvention technology by forcing publishers to pay for their own circumvention service. Eyeo also suggests other alternatives to ad reinsertion, They recommend putting up paywalls for users, which asks users to subscribe or pay a fee to see the publishers content.
Before the task-force was created, efforts to battle adblock circumvention were carried out 3rd party sources, mainly opensource. They believe the new task force will be much more effective than before.
Ben William, Director of advocacy at Eyeo states “The taskforce will respond to users and their requests for a better experience, wherever that may be. In general, we at Eyeo welcome all conversations with publishers to support meaningful and respectful monetization,” he said. “The task force is charged with finding technical solutions to third-party circumvention. At Eyeo, our mission is to provide users with control when they’re online while keeping the web fair and profitable.”
The battle between adblock circumvention and adblockers is endless, however, Eyeos would clearly prefer publishers to submit to its Acceptable Ads whitelist route. Forcing the publishers to pay for their whitelist causes publishers to lose more money and ultimately hurts the publishers more than they help.