You might be perturbed if somebody calls your business an "extortion racket" or your sales pitch a "ransom note." But Eyeo Chief Executive Till Faida, leader of the widely used Adblock Plus browser extension, is unruffled. The way he sees it, he's just trying to rescue online advertising and the websites that rely on it.
The criticism stems from the company's business: Offer a browser extension that blocks ads, then carve off 30% of ad revenue from large publishers that agree to participate in an Eyeo program that unblocks ads. Faida doesn't say who's paying, but looking through Eyeo's "whitelist" that governs which websites get to show ads, you'll see big names like Google and Amazon.
"There needs to be a sustainable way to fund content on the web, but it should be done in a user-controlled way," Faida told me while visiting CNET during one of his periodic US excursions from Eyeo headquarters in Cologne, Germany.
Back in the good old days of online advertising, people blocked ads because they didn't like in-your-face clutter. Now people often block them because they can invade your privacy, slow down websites, flatten your phone's battery, eat through your data plan and deliver malware.
No wonder, then, that Eyeo's ad-blocking software is on 100 million PCs and smartphones and that AdBlock Plus is the top Firefox extension by far. But it's hard to block ads everywhere without driving websites to paywalls, and Eyeo's situation is complicated. Even as it blocks some ads, it also offers an ad exchange of its own to help supply publishers with ads. Here's a closer look at the Adblock Plus landscape.
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