Adblock Plus

How does it make sense to whitelist Advertisers or Ad Networks (https://acceptableads.com/get-whitelisted/) when acceptable ads criteria are mainly about the way advertisements are displayed but not their content? Is it not in the publisher's power to make an advertisement acceptable or not?

Nowadays most publishers don't even know which ads are being shown on their websites but instead only control from which sources the ads are coming from. Some ad networks such as AdSense at least give them a little bit more control over the ads themselves (e.g. the formatting, whether they're animated, what category of ads to show). However, it's still very limited and most of them are still having trouble even identifying something as obvious as malicious ads.

On top of that, adblockers can't block ads based on their content because for that the ad would need to be downloaded in the first place and some further processing would need to happen. Unblocking ads based on their content would be even more challenging than that. Therefore even if there were criteria for the content of the ads, they would be difficult/impossible to enforce.

I share your opinion that ad blockers cannot block ads based on their content because for that the ad would need to be downloaded first and would require some additional processing. But they help a lot to keep the navigation very friendly

I share your opinion that ad blockers cannot block ads based on their content because for that the ad would need to be downloaded first and would require some additional processing. But they help a lot to keep the navigation very friendly