Dot-com "bribery"

Ad blockers make massive amount of money out of you.

"Ad blockers " have a clear task - they block internet advertising. Anyone who's annoyed by the images , animations, pop-ups or text ads, just downloads the program, installs it and then surfs without ads. At least that is promised.Some ads however go through despite that promise. For example, in Adblock Plus, the most widely used program in the world to block ads since the end of 2011 did not block the so-called " acceptable ads ." Which ad is " acceptable, decides the company behind Adblock Plus - Eyeo: it must be discreet, it should not contain any animations, sound and eye-catching images.To be included in the so-called " white list "  of Adblock Plus - i.e. list of websites whose ads stating big companies must pay.

 According to research by blogger Sasha Palenberg , which has FAZ.NET , Google has paid for this service last year a $ 25 million bill ( € 18.45 million ) .In June 2013 Palenberg that operates the site www.mobilegeeks.de made ​​serious allegations against Eyeo. According to him, the company operates " mafiosi network" and puts the websites such as business friends in the white list, but the ones that do not fall in their business circle can buy their place in the list. Google confirmed at the time before the Frankfurter Allgemeine that it is in the white list and is paying for it.



Exactly how much money Google poured over to the creators of Adblock Plus, the company is not clear.After Palenberg Google is not the only company that pays for its inclusion in the whitelist . The largest online retailer Amazon and Ebay auctions platform together paid about 5 million. FromYahoo, Adblock Plus has received money too, but it is not clear what is the amount .The creators of Adblock Plus do not deny that large companies are paying to fall in this list. For blogs and news sites , however, this is quite annoying - Adblock Plus undermines the original business model of companies like Google, but also blogs and news sites, but then again run ads on the pages on payment of a certain sum of money. Google however has an interest to pay for the white list : As the blog Business Insider states : in 2012 Google has lost 887 million dollars in sales because of blocked ads. On the other hand - those $ 25 million paid to Adblock Plus, a relatively small amount of this background. Eyeo indicates payments white list as " compensation ." Indeed , maintaining this white list hardly is a great effort: The list is simply a series of web pages , domains, sub-domains and countries endings. Relevant sites only need to be copied and placed in the list, describes the procedure Palenberg . Adblocker itself is programmed so that it loads the current list at regular intervals on the user's computer .

Much more complicated, however,  looks like the maintenance of the so-called "black list" , ie a list of all filters that hide all banners on the internet. This list is great as Palenberg 1.19 megabytes and contains 39,998 lines. For comparison - the white list is only 231 KB and 4026 lines."Adblock Plus is not a blocker for ads, it's a blocker for competitors ," he says .