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Adblock Plus still legal in Germany — for now
Adblock Plus will be safe for another day in Germany, as Eyeo GmbH, the company behind the ad-blocking browser extension, has won its sixth court case against a publisher that tried to shut it down.
This time, Eyeo’s opponent was Spiegel Online, which is the online counterpart to Der Spiegel, one of the largest news publications in Europe. Spiegel Online argued that Adblock Plus violates Germany’s unfair competition act.
“Every single case wants to do the same thing,” said Ben Williams, head of communications for Eyeo. “They say we shouldn’t offer a service that allows users to block ads.”
It is no surprise that advertisers hate tools like Adblock Plus, which allow users to almost entirely avoid the online advertisements on which brands spend tens of billions of dollars each year. Advertising is a huge source of revenue not just for publications like Der Spiegel, but also for major tech companies like Google and Facebook. In fact, Facebook brought in over $6 billion in ad revenue in its second quarter of this year alone, which explains why the social network has been working to circumvent ad-blockers.
Online ads also help smaller brands, and even individual content creators on sites like YouTube or Twitch earn money from ads, so in this way, ad-blockers could potentially have a direct effect on someone’s income.
It is partly for this reason, according to Eyeo, that Adblock Plus began allowing brands to pay to have their ads whitelisted as long as they meet certain criteria. These so-called “Acceptable Ads” must be small, placed outside of the main content of the page, and cannot contain animations, sounds or distracting images. In return for allowing these ads, Eyeo takes 30 percent of the revenue generated by the Adblock Plus users who view them.
According to Williams, Eyeo’s court victories in Germany are beneficial for all ad-blocking services, many of which do not allow any ads through.
“If they [German publishers] were able to, they’d shutter all the ad-blockers out there,” Williams said. “They’d file similar claims, whether it’s against Adblock Plus, uBlock origin, or a hobby developer making an ad-blocker in her basement. That would all essentially be illegal.”
Image: Eyeo CEO Till Faida, courtesy of Eyeo GMBH
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