• Contently, Friday, September 16, 2016 6:35 AM

Contently got an interview with Tim Schumacher, co-founder and chairman of Adblock Plus and its parent company, Eyeo at DMEXCO in Cologne, Germany this week. He shared his thoughts about the company's move into ad sales and said that “hundreds of publishers” have expressed interested in the proposition. Schumacher added: "Yeah, we’ve been surprised. Both in a good way that we got a lot of attention, but also in a bad way in that our announcement was actually smaller than what it looked like. A lot of people interpreted it as, 'Hey, we’re now selling ads,' which is not true. We’re not selling ads. Our new platform is actually an SSP—a supply-side platform that allows ad exchanges to connect into our inventory of publishers. So it’s a tool to help publishers monetize ad-blocker users." He goes on to explain to Contently that, "We’ve had that model of acceptable ads for five years, so it’s nothing new. We’ve been surprised that people are like, 'So, now you’re selling ads? Has Adblock Plus sold out?' For five years, we’ve been trying to hammer into people’s minds that Adblock Plus is not an all-or-nothing ad blocker."

When asked about the perception that the company is "stealing impressions from the publishers and reselling them," Schumacher said: "That is not true. That’s the Brave [browser] model, for example. What we do is block ads. But we’re the only ad blocker that tries to mediate between users and publishers. And we let the publishers choose—okay, we let certain ads through, but it’s the publishers’ own ads. It’s not any third-party ads from us or anything. The publisher just whitelists ads it otherwise shows. It only whitelists the ads that meet certain criteria."

Read the whole story at Contently »