Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus - Agreements

Why are agreements necessary?

We have to add filters to allow ads that aren't intrusive, this cannot be an automatic process. However, this is far from trivial — the same advertising network might serve non-intrusive advertisements on some web sites and intrusive advertisements on others. Or it might depend on the geographic region of the site visitor or some other factor. But even if all the ads meet our criteria now, there is no guarantee that things will stay that way.

To solve this problem we decided to work out agreements with websites and advertising networks that want to participate. They tell us what we should add to the "non-intrusive ads" list but have to guarantee that these ads will meet our criteria. They also have to notify us in case of changes.

Why are there so few entries on the "non-intrusive ads" list?

There is significant interest from websites and advertising networks. However, we are still testing the feature and working out the details. We are evaluating feedback both from users and from advertisers and we don't want to add too many entries to the list because the requirements might still change considerably. Also, we simply don't have the resources to proceed faster here.

How do you verify that a company meets the requirements?

Right now this is a manual process. We are working on the right tools, and we hope that our community will help us by reporting violations of our policies.

Do companies pay you for being added to the list?

Whitelisting is free for all small websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That's why we are being supported by some strategic partners who want to secure the sustainability of the Acceptable Ads initiative.