Eyeo GmbH’s popular Adblock Plus program is in the news today for all the wrong reasons: the company is taking money from advertisers to let their ads be seen by Adblock Plus users.

A report from the Financial Times claims that Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others have been paying money to the company to whitelist their ads. The Adblock Plus extension for Chrome, Firefox and other browsers is the most popular free tool on the market offering to block ads from appearing on websites.

This isn’t the first time the company has been accused of taking cash for letting ads appear, with reports surfacing in 2013 that Google had been paying for the privilege. The news today suggests though that the practice is far more widespread than initially thought.

To be fair to Adblock Plus the company does admit to the practice to some extent; on its “acceptable ads” policy page the company states that “starting with Adblock Plus 2.0 you can allow some of the advertising not considered annoying to be viewed,” however this option is switched on by default, and users have to choose to block all ads to avoid the whitelisted ads.

Adblock has previously said that only 25 per cent of Adblock Plus users are strictly against any advertising, and that those users can disable the feature.

It’s easy to attack Adblock Plus over the decision to take money to let ads get through, after all it does sell out its core ardents who champion an ad free internet, and there’s even a rough argument that they are indulging in false advertising. However despite the dubious nature of offering to block ads then not doing so for cash, they are entitled to make money from the service, after all they’re not a benevolent charity.

Eyeo GmbH has so far not commented on the report.