Thanks for your thoughtful response. I will agree to disagree on some points and agree on others. Although this corporate payment issue is not specifically Google related, it is well known that the majority of their revenues come from advertising. In these unaudited numbers, 2014 revenues were $59,056 million out of a total $66,001 million. Non-trivial, big bucks (
https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html). So needless to say there is a lot at stake when a popular browser add-on can quite easily block the vast majority of internet advertising.
1. Even though Google and others are paying money to adblock plus to be white listed, they are not receiving perferential treatment as anyone can be white listed, if any thing they are receiving harsher treatment as smaller companies do not have to pay to have ads white listed
Partially agree. Unless you are an insider, neither you or i will ever know whether there has been any preferential treatment. Even though the acceptable ads policies appear thorough, there can always be grey areas. When money is exchanged, it is difficult to remain objective, and this could easily become a conflict of interest.
2. All white listed ads still have to meet the 'acceptable ads' requirements as decided by adblock plus.. They are not given blanket white listing
No blanket whitelisting, okay. Google and the other large corporations paying Adblock Plus certainly have the resources to create
acceptable advertising to ensure their ads are whitelisted.
3. It does not matter as the project is open source, you can turn it off, and there is already many many forks.
Most certainly agree. This is the main purpose for starting this thread, to notify other forum members about these issues. Obviously most members are quite internet savvy, so maybe i shouldn't even have bothered to post. There is certainly no shortage of alternative ad blockers or tweaked configurations to keep out ads.
4. This is not news. The white listing policy of adblock plus has been publically available for a long time.
As already mentioned, Adblock Plus' whitelisting is not news. It's only apparent when you dig down to the finer print, however, that money is being exchanged. Too bad Adblock Plus wasn't a publicly traded corporation, as i would definitely like to peruse their financials. Not too many browser add-ons can claim >300 million downloads and financial payment from some of the largest corporations in the world.