Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus - Agreements

Why are agreements necessary?

We have to add filters to allow ads that aren't intrusive. This cannot be an automatic process. However, this is far from trivial - the same advertising network might serve non-intrusive advertisements on some websites and intrusive ones on others. But even if all the ads meet our criteria now, there is no guarantee that things will stay that way.

To solve this problem we decided to work out agreements with websites and advertising networks that want to participate. They provide us with their ads that are deemed non-intrusive. They then have to guarantee that these ads will continue to abide by our criteria. Finally, they are required to notify us in case of any changes.

How do you verify that a company meets the requirements?

Right now this is a manual process. We are working on the right tools, and we hope that our community will help us by reporting violations of our policies.

Do companies pay you for being added to the list?

Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That's why we are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.