Adblock Plus chases a broken business model

Adblock Plus and friends may be costing publishers literally billions of dollars in lost revenue, but that doesn’t mean they can’t pretend to save the world at the same time.

And today they’re once again doing exactly that. The developers behind the controversial/successful software announced a brand new initiative to bring publishers a “half billion dollars” in 2017.

It works like Flattr…no wait, it actually is Flattr, rebranded and rebilled as Flattr Plus. And it basically means you’ll be able to tip participating websites for their service, while still robbing them of ad revenue.

ABP claims this will “revolutionize web monetization”, even though Flatter has been a thing since 2010 and has still yet to actually make any real impact upon the ad-reliant business model of the web.

From the ABP blog:

Even after all these years, the web’s primary purpose is still to share information. It just got a little hung up on one type of information: ads. Look, we don’t want to break up, Ads. There’s still plenty of space for you here … we just want to see other people. Are you cool with that?

And from The Wall Street Journal:

Flattr and Adblock Plus will keep a 10% cut of the revenue generated from the Flattr Plus program and divide it between them.

For the record this is the same company that took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Google, Microsoft and even Taboola to show “Acceptable Ads” to users. It’s borderline extortion.

But don’t worry though publishers, Adblock Plus has got you. Definitely. For sure. Dis gon be revolutionary.