Dive Brief:
- German-based Adblock Plus has partnered with Swedish micropayment firm Flattr to allow Adblock Plus users to pay for online content -- and provide the company with a new revenue stream.
- Adblock Plus Operations Manager Ben Williams told Ad Exchanger, “The idea comes from something we’ve heard a lot from our own users, which is that they don’t want the advertising experience they have on the web, but they want to reward content they like.”
- Adblock Plus’s other revenue stream is its "whitelist" of acceptable ads that have been deemed to provide an acceptable user experience. Those are allowed to pass through its blocking tech and be served to website visitors.
Dive Insight:
The debate about ad blocking has gone from tense to heated in recent months among publishers, advertisers and ad block software companies. Users are clearly fed up with the current ad experience and the solution to users' dismay is what these various players have yet to agree on.
The new program, called Flattr Plus, allows Adblock Plus users to determine how much they want to contribute to content providers monthly to view content. The partners will keep 10% of that total revenue and distribute the remainder to publishers based on an engagement algorithm that will determine where Flattr Plus users are spending the most time.
"We’ll be looking at what content engagement metrics work best. We want to pick up on indicators like that, and then we’ll automatically divvy up the dollars that user offered for browsing that month," Williams said. The algorithm will take into account time spent on webpages, watching or listening to rich content on those pages, and taking advantage of other engagement opportunities available on websites.
Publishers are already sounding off against the new venture, with one publisher telling Digiday it's simply another attempt by Adblock Plus to tax publishers. Most likely the Interactive Advertising Bureau won’t be pleased with Adblock Plus’s latest initiative either. While it it’s distributing money to publishers, it’s still disrupting the advertising-for-free-content model as well taking revenue off the top before sending payments to publishers.