Adblock Plus Unveils a Way Users Can Tip the Websites They Visit

One of the most popular ad-blocking extensions on the Web, Adblock Plus (ABP), has announced a partnership with Flattr to help publishers monetise their websites despite ad-blocking.

Eyeo, the maker of Adblock Plus, announced on Tuesday that it had partnered with the Flattr Web monetisation service to launch Flattr Plus. Currently in beta, users can sign up to the service now, and it will available for testing by the end of May. The company added that Flattr Plus service will be launched in its complete form by the end of the year.

The move follows a similar initiative called 'Brave Ledger' by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich in the Brave browser, which is still in development. While Eich had unveiled a user-publisher-browser revenue sharing model, the model Adblock Plus employs is slightly different. Users have to decide how much they want to commit to the entire Web ecosystem, and Flattr Plus will "automatically apportion" this amount to websites that users most engage with. There do not seem to be any granular controls at this stage, like Eich specified for the Brave Ledger.

In a blog post, Eyeo communications manager Ben Williams explained the motivation behind the move, "As we've written many times before, Acceptable Ads was a conscious pivot away from blocking all the things toward finding a way to block only the annoying things, so publishers can monetize on users' terms. That was 2011. Since then we've been trying to figure out an ad-less way for users to fund content, because, well, we felt like it was the right thing to do."

Williams in the post adds that signing up for Flattr Plus is easy for publishers, and that they will not be required to show any Flattr Plus logos or tags on their websites. He also said that Eyeo aims to generate $500 million for publishers next year with the service.