To be or not to be is evidently not a position that Adblock Plus, the internet’s self-proclaimed heroic ad-blocking machine, feels too concerned with. While the German-made content-filtering browser extension may be essentially in the business of blocking ads, it’s also just lately come under the gun in the tech media for announcing it’s getting into the business of selling ads.

Controversy is nothing new to the world’s most used and downloaded extension, but the move is not quite as hypocritical as it sounds, not in the same vein as, say, a bug exterminator clearing out the roaches only to then release a sack of rats into your basement.

For a long time now it has been argued that ad filtering plug-ins literally ruin some businesses. A kind of treaty between Adblock Plus and its nemesis – ads – was announced in 2011 when the company started its “Acceptable Ads program.”

This program, we were told, would keep the nasty, annoying, ugly ads away and allow the more svelte, eye-pleasing ads to run on a website. Right now Adblock Plus is in the process it says of improving the program, stating in a blog post that the two-tier improvements encompass “opening the policy of Acceptable Ads and improving the process of getting whitelisted through the Acceptable Ads initiative.”

Everyone’s a winner?

The latter is where most of the work is being done, explains the company. This will involve a “marketplace” of acceptable ads –  The Acceptable Ads platform (Beta) – that “lets publishers and bloggers choose from a marketplace of pre-whitelisted ads that they can drag and drop onto their sites.”

The process should be a great time-saver, says Adblock Plus, as whitelisting used to take weeks and now takes seconds. On the other hand, publishers can choose to turn off the Acceptable Ads feature.

What this all means is that Adblock Plus has more control over what ads appear on your website. It becomes the dictator of your advertising revenue, and also the arbiter of “ethical” ads.

When buying ads from the marketplace, the publisher will still get a handsome 80 percent, while 6 percent will go back to Adblock Plus – the entity that blocked and then unblocked the ad and made some money at the same time.

In the company’s defense, Ben Williams, Adblock Plus’ operations and communications director, said this had to happen in time as ads will always be here to stay and better we have the good than the bad. He also said that in terms of judging good ads against bad ads, Adblock Plus is working on forming a committee made up of publishers, privacy advocates and advertisers.

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