Yesterday Adblock Plus announced that it is going to start selling ads using its new Acceptable Ads Platform. Now in beta, this new service helps move forward the Acceptable Ads Initiative that Adblock Plus launched in 2011 while serving as a “compromise between users and advertisers,” according to Ben Williams of Adblock Plus.

Created in partnership with ComboTag, the Acceptable Ads Platform lets publishers and bloggers choose pre-whitelisted ads from an ad marketplace to place on their sites using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. These pre-approved, pre-designed ads meet the Acceptable Ads criteria for content, size, labeling and placement. The ads from this platform will be served to users who choose to use the Acceptable Ads feature, though use of the feature will remain optional. Adblock Plus will continue to block all non-compliant ads.

“The Acceptable Ads Platform helps publishers who want to show an alternative, nonintrusive ad experience to users with ad blockers by providing them with a tool that lets them implement Acceptable Ads themselves,” said Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus, in yesterday’s announcement.

The benefit to publishers is that the whitelisting approval process goes faster. Instead of taking weeks to get an ad approved, the process can occur in a matter of seconds.

“There are two ecosystems of online consumers out there right now: the one composed of people who block intrusive ads and the other where people do not. The Acceptable Ads platform lets publishers reach the former group without changing anything about how we’re reaching the latter,” said Faida. “We’ve been waiting years for the ad-tech industry to do something consumer-friendly like this, so finally we got tired of waiting and decided to do it ourselves.”

Williams said there are two primary benefits to publishers who use the Acceptable Ads Platform. First, there is a feedback mechanism embedded in each ad so readers can offer input as to whether the ad is good, bad or somewhere in between. That feedback will be considered during the real-time bidding process. This allows end users to influence the process rather than using tracking tools.

Second, small and medium sized publishers and websites can use the platform to supplement its existing ad networks and partnerships. This gives them the option to still serve ads to users of Adblock Plus.

Users of Adblock Plus, however, aren’t really getting a benefit from this. Sure, they can turn off all ads, including these new pre-whitelisted ads, but that’s the whole purpose of adblocking, isn’t it – blocking all ads? So far, Adblock Plus users are not impressed if the comments on Williams’ blog post are any indication. One user said he would uninstall the ad blocking browser forever and was installing a different one. Another said the new platform defeats the whole reason for installing Adblock Plus.

Insider Take:

An ad blocking company is now selling ads it deems to be acceptable. This is an ironic move, considering that Adblock Plus is the most popular ad blocking browser extension, running on more than 100 million active devices. While it does create an opportunity for compromise, this doesn’t really benefit ad block users. Instead, it benefits advertisers and publishers who don’t want to lose web traffic or advertising revenue because of intrusive, annoying ads.

For advertisers and publishers, this is good news, but without user buy-in, this experiment will likely fail. That’s what’s good about beta though. Adblock Plus has the opportunity to launch its product, test it in the marketplace, and either make adjustments to suit its respective audiences or abandon it altogether. It will be interesting to watch this play out as ad blocking companies like Adblock Plus and Brave try to change the game midstream.