Adblock Plus pens open letter asking Twitter to join its Acceptable Ads initiative, promises happier users

Twitter yesterday filed its S-1 paperwork to go public, leading many to make the rather obvious conclusion that the service will soon have to push more ads in order to make more money (it’s still not profitable) and satisfy investors. Adblock Plus this morning took the news as an opportunity to write an open letter to Twitter, asking the company to join its Acceptable Ads initiative.

For those who don’t know, Adblock Plus stopped blocking all types of ads back in October 2012. The logic behind the move was simple: the company isn’t looking to kill the advertising industry; it just wants to clean it up. As such, certain ads were allowed through to the user.

Here’s the crux of the Adblock’s letter to Twitter:

Your current ad offerings are actually not far from what we’d consider non-annoying (see more below) – but the idea of a fundamentally changed Twitter, now with ads round every corner, may direct users to Adblock Plus for no other reason than that they want their “old” Twitter back.

So why not work together? We would like to partner with you to engineer acceptable, non-intrusive advertising that would conform to our guidelines and make it to our whitelist. That’s right, we want you to advertise. But we want you to do it responsibly, by adhering to our Acceptable Ads guidelines.

Not only would your ads not be blocked by the millions of Adblock Plus users, but you’d be helping shift the paradigm of online advertising away from the blinking, privacy-killing pro-market stance to the clean, privacy-protecting user-first one.

Furthermore, Adblock Plus outlined the five principles of Acceptable Ads, which were defined by its community:

• Acceptable Ads are not annoying.
• Acceptable Ads do not disrupt or distort page content.
• Acceptable Ads are transparent with us about being an ad.
• Acceptable Ads are effective without shouting at us.
• Acceptable Ads are appropriate to the site or tweet that we are on.

We doubt Twitter will listen to Adblock Plus, although it’s certainly an interesting proposition. In fact, we believe Twitter should at least take a look and compare its rules with Adblock’s guidelines: if they aren’t too different, it could make some minor changes and potentially make quite a bit more money.

See also – Reddit is whitelisted by Adblock Plus for only using ‘acceptable ads’

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