ad blocking

Eyeo has appointed a new CEO, Douglas de Jager, and is refocusing the company on privacy-first advertising tools while cutting 40% of its staff.

Do people hate ads? No, according to Vegard Johnsen, eyeo’s chief product officer. What they don’t like, he says, is not being treated with respect.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. AdExchanger’s daily news round-up will return in 2023. Enjoy your holiday, and may we all resolve to make fewer cookie jokes in the new year. Of No Account A ProPublica report levels damning criticisms at the Google Display Network.  For one thing, accounts […]

Eyeo is known for ad blocking, but it’s got its eye on ad filtering. On Tuesday, eyeo, which is the parent company of AdBlock and Adblock Plus – two of the most-downloaded standalone ad blockers – acquired Blockthrough, a company for ad block revenue recovery.

Just like a rising tide lifts all boats, a receding tide grounds all ships. When someone turns on an ad blocker out of frustration, that decision also affects publishers making an effort to serve up respectful ad experiences, says Blockthrough CEO Marty Krátký-Katz.

The Acceptable Ads Committee, the group that establishes quality guidelines to whitelist ads on ad blockers, has a new president and he’s an old programmatic hand. Terry Taouss, a Cento vet and currently a principal at ad tech consultancy AdProfs, is taking on the role, replacing Marty Kratky-Katz, co-founder and CEO of Blockthrough.

IAB Europe; IAB You’re Up The IAB Europe published a blog post on Friday with the news that the Belgian data protection authority (the APD) will find the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the industry mechanism for conveying consent signals in the bidstream, to be in breach of GDPR. The decision hinges on the IAB […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. W3C Meets Ad Tech Drama The W3C is negotiating a tricky influx of members and attention as it becomes an increasingly important stakeholder in online advertising. That’s because browser operators like Chrome, Apple’s Safari WebKit group, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla are the W3C natives, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Out Of The Blocks Mobile ad blocking is on the rise. More than 527 million people around the world have an ad blocker installed on their mobile devices, up 64% since 2016, according to a report from PageFair and Blockthrough. In the United States, […]

Ghostery aims to help users block the trackers it has been helping them monitor… for a price. The company has developed a VPN and blocking tool that will shut down trackers embedded in desktop applications. The tools, which entered an invite-only beta on Thursday, will be grouped together under the name Ghostery Midnight and sold […]

The publisher tech startup Blockthrough, which specializes in retrieving revenue lost to ad blocking, acquired its rival and category pioneer PageFair on Thursday. Terms were not disclosed. PageFair was one of the first startups offering technology for publishers to counteract ad blocking, either by circumventing the ad blocker or by creating new direct audience agreements, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. TV Killed The Video Star? Videology, a video ad network that tried to reinvent itself as an advanced TV company, plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amobee has offered $45 million for the company’s assets, which likely will […]

There’s no love for annoying ads on Chrome this Valentine’s Day. Google will release a new version of its browser on Thursday with a built-in ad blocker. Here’s how it works. Chrome will now block all ads on sites that don’t adhere to the ad quality standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads, an […]

Google will turn on its built-in Chrome ad blocker on Feb. 15, meaning ad tech companies must hustle to get their products in compliance as publishers fear lost revenue. Beginning that day, Chrome will begin auto-blocking ad formats that obstruct access to content. Chrome has more than 62% of the mobile browser market share and […]

Google had always been eager to kill shoddy ad formats, because doing so would stall ad-blocker growth. At the same time, it didn’t want to be the judge and jury, so it needed a mechanism to do so. Enter the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), a nonprofit founded by the IAB, ANA and 4As to […]

Ad blocking is generally associated with early browser extensions like AdBlock and eyeo’s Adblock Plus (ABP), which both make their money through the Acceptable Ads whitelisting platform designed by ABP to monetize ad-block users. But the consumer market for ad blocking has branched into apps, mobile browsers and antivirus software all peddling ad blocking wrapped […]

Apple is rolling out products to cut down on autoplay video and retargeting. At its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose on Thursday, Apple said it’s planning two features in the next version of Safari, dubbed High Sierra, that will cut down on ads that stalk you around the internet and videos that play uninvited. […]

Rumors that Google is considering adding a built-in ad-blocking feature to its Chrome browser elicited a mix of shouts and shrugs across the digital advertising landscape. The potential Chrome ad-blocking extension, first reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, would block ad formats deemed unacceptable by the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), a cross-industry trade […]

The Israeli startup Shine is rebranding to Rainbow as it abandons its ad-blocking roots in favor of ad-targeting and verification services, the company revealed Friday. “We have been really trying to identify a path forward and the commercialization opportunities for the base technology,” said CRO James Collier, who joined the company last July. Shine (ahem, […]

Sourcepoint, a company founded last year to provide publishers with an antidote to ad blocking, has made its first major product release since raising a $10 million Series A round in June. The product, Dialogue, allows publishers to deliver a message to users with ad blockers installed and then test the efficacy of those messages. […]

Google has severed its relationship with ComboTag, the Israeli startup that sourced buyers for Adblock Plus’ recently launched Acceptable Ads Platform. “We were just as surprised as you were and certainly don’t want to be in a business relationship that [supports this],” Google’s SVP of ads and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, told reporters at DMEXCO in […]

Germany-based Adblock Plus (ABP) on Tuesday debuted its beta supply-side platform (SSP) offering, called the Acceptable Ads Platform. It marks the company’s first move into an ad tech space it typically criticizes. “We’ve always called the Acceptable Ads initiative an ongoing experiment,” ABP ops manager Ben Williams told AdExchanger. “We’ve improved it over time, surveying […]

African mobile network Econet Wireless will pre-install Shine’s ad-blocking tech for 40 million subscribers across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Burundi and Lesotho. The deal, revealed Thursday, represents the Israeli startup’s third public telco partner and its second full integration. Although Econet will pre-install Shine’s network-level ad-blocking technology for all of its subscribers, government regulations require Econet […]

Facebook introduced a page-loading protocol on Tuesday that makes its ads almost indistinguishable from Facebook content, and thus prevents ad blockers from working on its site. Andrew Bosworth, the social media company’s VP of ads and business platform, said the change forces ad blockers to choose between not blocking ads or severely undermining the user […]

It’s probably not a good idea to use Google Translate on legal language. Roughly two weeks ago, the Chinese government released online regulations that include new rules governing paid search results, embedded links, video ads and email advertising. A buried clause within the edict also seems to outlaw ad blocking – and when Adblock Plus realized […]

After a string of court losses, Axel Springer finally landed a blow on Eyeo’s Adblock Plus (ABP). On Friday, a German court granted the German publishing giant a partial victory in its appeal of a previous decision. In question was ABP’s Acceptable Ads initiative, an open source ad-block revenue channel (meaning other ad blockers can […]

The current state of the advertising value exchange often leaves a little something to be desired, which sometimes leads to ad blocking and sometimes leads to total disengagement with advertising. “Most people block ads because they don’t feel like they’re getting value out of them,” said Matt Berriman, CEO and co-founder of Unlockd, an Australian […]

There would be far less of an ad-blocking brouhaha if publishers took a page out of the print playbook, said Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, one of the earliest entrants on the mobile newsreader app scene. “There’s a big opportunity rooted in the timeless principles of print, where people, generally speaking, actually enjoy the advertising,” […]

To know your enemy, you must become your enemy. That could be one way to view Google’s rumored entrance into the world of ad blocking. Recent buzz has centered on Google spearheading an industrywide initiative that sounds a heck of a lot like an acceptable ads program, taking an unexpected page from the Adblock Plus […]

Whether or not Ghostery is an ad blocker depends on how you define “ad blocker.” Also depends on who you ask. It’s an awkward question for a company that wears two seemingly different hats in the online ad industry. The first is as one of two primary privacy compliance technology providers powering the Digital Advertising […]