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Online publishers often hate ad-blockers like AdBlock Plus. Owners of smaller blog sites complain that they get little to no revenue from the work they produce. You may have also noticed some major news sites like Forbes and Wired have restricted access to their articles unless you turn off your ad-blocker or pay a monthly fee.

There are advantages to ad blockers, however. It keeps the readers safe from malicious ads that can harm your computer and from tracking URLs that invade privacy. It also preserves the original design of the page and doesn’t display annoying loud or flashing ads. There are also a large number of sites that don’t filter adult ads, which makes browsing at work or in public very difficult.

Recently, AdBlock Plus has announced that they are teaming up with a company called Flattr. Flatter is founded by Peter Sunde, one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay. AdBlock Plus and Flatter plan to implement a solution that they feel will make both advertisers and readers happy. The team will release a product called “Flattr Plus” that will allow readers to decide which content they want to pay for.

How will it work? The platform will let users to fund the content they wish to see within a set monthly budget. The money spent will be distributed to publishers based on engagement of their material. It is unclear at this point how exactly they plan to track engagement, since many people click on things they don’t mean to, or wish they hadn’t. There are also plenty of instances where readers leave tabs open for long periods of time.

Publishers will have to sign up with Flattr Plus in order to get paid. One problem with this is that Flattr Plus could decide to exclude websites they don’t like or disagree with, which would make it unfair for many users on the Internet.

Would you pay for a service like Flattr Plus in order to eliminate ads from your browsing experience? Some say they will simply switch to another ad-blocking service such as Ublock.

@socialhax this is big part about why everyone is switching to ublock origin. adblock dev is starting to get greedy. ublock is better anyway — Full Metal Patriot (@fullmetalzen) May 3, 2016

Photo Credit: Francisco Osorio