Ben Williams, AdBlock Plus

My name is Ben Williams. I am the Communications and Operations Director at AdBlock Plus and Eyeo. Eyeo is the company that makes AdBlock Plus in addition to a lot of other products that seek to give users the power over their internet experience, but also keep the internet profitable and sustainable and free. So yeah, that's what we do. We have over 100 million active devices for AdBlock Plus alone, but we're working on a lot of other really exciting things. We're seeing AdBlock go to mobile, and we're investing a lot into our mobile products like AdBlock Browser. But we're also looking at other things like the future of funding content, and that is a project we're called Flatter Plus, and it is an algorithm we're developing right now that's going to allow people to easily and automatically fund the content that they love. And so we're super excited about that right now. Well, we've got two ways that we can sort of monetize content. The one way is through what we call acceptable ads. It's something that we started, but since then has become sort of a standard for the industry, and it's just partial ad blocking. And so that helps publishers monetize by finding advertisements that AdBlock users will accept. So we run that program, but in complement to that, we have this program I mentioned a second ago called Flatter Plus, and what that does is it simply allows users to put a certain amount of money into a pot, and that is then dispersed automatically to the sites and the content creators that they engage with the most. And so we're in the process right now of making that algorithm, but both of these things help publishing and help publishers in general and content creators to sort of monetize their content in two ways. So they can go to ad blocking users on their own terms. In other words, the ad blocking user stays in control, but then they can also monetize beyond ads in this complementary system that we're making called Flatter Plus. Super constructive. The conversations with publishers are exactly the ones we've been having for the last couple of years, and that's how we figured out how to do acceptable ads. And it's also how we figured out how to sort of give up acceptable ads, which is something that we've been doing recently, and it's called the Acceptable Ads Committee. And it's actually when we're going to give control over what is acceptable and what is not to an independent committee. And it's going to be made up of publishers, of advertising networks, and also of people on the user side as well. So this conversation, it's always a very productive one, and we feel like it's one that only we can have because we have that trust of users. And it's been really, really nice to be able to invite publishers into that circle where they can actually speak to ad block users and we can all figure out a better solution together. I think that we're going to learn how best to approach the ad blocking web. We can call it the independent web, if you like, and that's going to always be a minority. But we're going to find a way to serve them ads that they will accept. Because we have done a lot of studies and it turns out that the majority of people, 83% in fact, would prefer not to blanket ad block, but rather only block the obnoxious stuff. So I think right now we're in the transition period of figuring out, well, what's okay for this audience? I think then for the majority of the web, the other traditional web, they can be reached in the same way that they've been reached for a long time. And then finally, I think there's going to be a complementary way to fund content online. And to fund not only the top publishers in the world, like the New York Times and CNN, but also to those on the longer end of the tail, like maybe your friend who's a writer and publishes their stuff online. So we may have the answer with Flutter Plus. I think we do. I think we're the only ones who can find it. If we don't, someone else will. And we'll find a way to actually make the web much more sustainable by reaching users on their own terms and leaving the control in their hands.