Publishers hate ad blockers, but millions of internet users embrace them — and many browsers even bake it in as a feature, including Google’s own Chrome. At the same time, growing numbers of publishers are walling off free content for visitors who hard-block ads, even asking users directly to be whitelisted.
It’s a fight for attention from two very different sides.
Some form of ad blocking is here to stay, so long as advertisements are irritating and the adtech industry remains deaf to genuine privacy reform. Although the nature of the ad-blocking business is generally closer to filtering than blocking, where is it headed?
We chatted with Till Faida, co-founder and CEO of eyeo, maker of Adblock Plus (ABP), to take the temperature of an evolving space that’s never been a stranger to controversy — including fresh calls for his company to face antitrust scrutiny.
Ad blocking: from desktop to mobile
While it’s become a significant feature of the online landscape, ad blocking as a whole remains a minority activity in the U.S. and Europe, with as much as a third of internet users running a blocker, according to analysts — the exact rate varies per market. At last count, eyeo’s ABP had more than 100 million active monthly users on desktop.
Mobile usage complicates the picture, as activity on these devices tends to be dominated by apps — where browser-based ad blockers such as ABP aren’t in play (eyeo points users to VPN tools for that purpose).
Though the company claims it saw notable growth for its ad blocker on the mobile web last year — and has for some months been trailing updated usage metrics that Faida told us will reach a milestone “significantly higher” than the 100 million desktop figure it currently touts. (At the time of this writing, it hasn’t been able to provide a new mobile-web-fuelled usage milestone.)
The claimed growth on mobile — which Faida confirms is greater on Android than iOS — is a result of partnerships eyeo inked with browser and device makers to integrate its ad-blocking capability as a feature into their third-party software, he says.
“We’ve actually grown a lot on mobile this year [2019],” he told us in November. “We are… very much focused on the mobile web. In-app ad blocking is not really a thing because of the Play Store and App Store policies, but we’ve grown a lot through mobile web browsers.
“We have our own ad-block browser but also what we’ve experienced throughout [2019] especially is a lot of browsers that are trying to compete with Chrome they’re looking for a unique feature to offer — and we can be the provider of that feature for those browsers. So we have grown a lot in terms of our distribution on mobile — mostly through partnerships that we have with browsers that integrate ad-blocking as a feature.
“What I can share already is that about a quarter of our user base now is on mobile — and just about a year ago it was almost exclusively on desktop,” he added. “What we’ve seen is there’s huge demand for ad blocking as a feature — particularly with those browsers that are trying to compete with Chrome.”
It’s fair to say that the most apocalyptic predictions (for publishers) vis-à-vis the growth of ad blocking have not come to pass — although rates of ad blocking do appear to be holding steady.
In a report last summer, eMarketer said fewer internet users in the U.S. and Western Europe were blocking ads than expected, with around one in four U.S. internet users blocking ads on at least one internet-connected device, per its analysis. Though it expected the rate of blocking to be stable — rising only to 27% by the end of 2019.
Of the four countries it looked at — the U.S., U.K., France and Germany — internet users in Germany had the highest rate of ad blocking, with 32.8% using some form of it in the market in 2019.
Germany also happens to be eyeo’s home market.
The company is in the ecosystem-building game now, as Faida tells it. Its mission: to thread a fine line between conflicting interests and string together a critical mass of internet users who want to get rid of unwelcome distractions; and digital publishers and ad purveyors who want to maximize eyeballs on their stuff — and are likely especially keen to reach a tech-savvy, ad-blocking demographic.
Eyeo does this via what it calls “Acceptable Ads,” otherwise known as a set of standards for minimally distracting online ad formats. Ads that conform to this template are whitelisted and shown by default to users of ad-block products signed up to the program (including, but not limited to, ABP).
So really, eyeo — and the other major ad-blocking products that have come on board with this so-called Acceptable Ads standard over a period of several years — are actually in the ad filtering game these days.
Building an “ad-filtering ecosystem”
“Essentially what we’re building up is a new ecosystem in which there’s a rebalance between all the involved stakeholders; between the users, between the advertisers, the publishers,” said Faida, who added that eyeo is focused on building up an ecosystem “in a really open way.”
“Users can come through all kinds of products into our ecosystem and there are all kinds of solutions providers out there that are helping publishers monitor those users in the most appropriate way. And this is really what’s exciting and what we’re building; we have the unique opportunity to establish an ecosystem that creates real balance between all those conflicting interests of all the involved stakeholders. And we can create an ecosystem in which users have a much more pleasant browsing experience and publishers at the same time are able to monetize in a much more sustainable way.”
“I think the key is the transition from ad blocking to ad filtering because users have very good reasons to block certain types of ads,” he added, when asked how he sees ad blocking evolving over the next few years — including with rising attention on online privacy. “At the same time users want to make sure that there is a free and open internet. And this is exactly the process that we have initiated.
“That is now taking place — not just in ABP but really a lot of ad blockers that are joining the program. [We are] making sure that ad blocking or ad filtering is a tool to empower users so that users have control over their ad experience and at the same time, making sure this does not become a destructive element for a free and open internet.”
The Acceptable Ads program is not the only ad standards-setting game in town, of course. There is, for example, the ad industry-backed Coalition for Better Ads — which is what Google’s default Chrome ad blocker is signed up to.
But, as you can imagine, an ad industry-backed version of a threshold for “consumer acceptability” around ads is considerably more generous of what is allowed than a standard that has — at least — grown out of the phenomenon of consumer-driven ad blocking.
“If you look at just the amount of apps that the built-in Chrome ad blocker blocks — I don’t think this really lives up to the expectations that users have,” said Faida. “Because it only blocks less than 1% of the ads that are out there — so I think it’s a very limited ad-blocking experience compared to what we offer.”
Hence he sees the trend of growing interest in browsers bolting on more privacy protections for users as a business opportunity for eyeo — because “all those browsers are implementing some kind of ad-blocking functionality, but we’re very well-positioned to be the providers of that feature.”
At the same time, he said rising regulatory attention on digital privacy — which is resulting in increased security of adtech’s tracking of internet users that could result in a radical haircut of what’s considered acceptable business practice there — is not a concern, because most ad block users find ads annoying, not because they want to stop advertisers from tracking their behavior.
“The privacy reasons are not predominately the most common motivating factor — and even if this is the case, then I think the type of users that install an ad blocker, they don’t want to give up control over what’s happening on their device just because there’s some legislation in place,” Faida said.
“If you look at the reasons why people install ad blockers, there is a small minority of users that do this for privacy reasons — and I think especially those users they don’t want to wait for some kind of legislation; they want to have control themselves over what is happening on their device. But by far, the majority of users who install an ad blocker like ABP, they do this because of the annoyance level of many of the ads that are out there. So being able to watch a YouTube video without a pre-roll ad, those are the reasons why people install ad blockers.”
A hated business model under antitrust fire
Eyeo’s business model involves taking money from major publishers and ad networks in exchange for whitelisting ads that conform to the rules intended to minimize intrusiveness (smaller publishers and ad players aren’t charged for whitelisting) — a model that has earned the company accusations of extortion and hypocrisy, as well as multiple legal challenges.
On its home turf of Germany, publishing giant Axel Springer (a backer of Coalition for Better Ads) still seemingly hasn’t given up the fight — despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that dismissed its claims of antitrust and supported internet users’ right to block ads.
Eyeo also derives revenue from rival ad blockers that choose to sign up to the Acceptable Ads program — via whitelisting services it may be providing, either to a publisher, browser or adtech solution provider. Hence building an open ecosystem sums to growing its own revenues. (Rival ad blockers are incentivized to participate in eyeo’s ecosystem because they get to cut out their own slice of revenue from any whitelisted ads shown to their users.)
But some in the digital publishing industry continue to raise competition concerns — given how, despite consumers using a number of different and even separate ad-blocking products, a majority of users are defaulted to the same set of whitelisted ads. Which means they’re still being shown ads served by Google’s ad network, despite running an ad blocker. Resistance is, by default, futile.
This is because Google is one of the large entities that almost certainly pays eyeo to whitelist its ads, though Faida sidesteps a direct response when asked if the tech giant is a paying customer (nor would he confirm how much Google pays eyeo; rumours have suggested anything between $25 million and $50 million).
“We’re not talking about individual entities, but the rules are the same for everyone that participates,” he told us when asked directly if Google is still paying eyeo to whitelist ads.
Pushed on the lack of transparency over its business relationship with Google — especially in light of eyeo’s claims to be building an open ecosystem, Faida said eyeo has “always made that policy very transparent — that any partner who shows more than 10 million ad impressions per month to our users … are paying a percentage based on the incremental revenues they’re generating as a result of working with us, which ensures that smaller publishers are not paying and larger publishers are paying their fair share.”
So what’s eyeo’s commission for funneling a subset of ads through its toll gate? The percentage it gets paid to whitelist ads is “typically” 30% of recovered revenues, according to Faida, or “of the incremental revenues that our partners are generating as a result of working with us,” as he puts it. As a result, eyeo may be keeping a full third of the revenue from any whitelisted ads it lets through. Or, in some less typical instances, it may be keeping more.
Faida describes this model as being “very much in line with an industry standard pricing model,” making an indirect reference to the dominant app store business models. Although the 30% top-slice taken by, for example, Apple on iOS app revenues is hardly popular with developers — and has been variously described as an unfair tax, and even extortion.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court also gave the green light to an antitrust case to be brought against Apple by a group of iPhone users who argue the 30% commission represents an unlawful and unfair use of monopoly power.
Some have raised similar concerns about eyeo, given that their Acceptable Ads standard is the most dominant filter in play.
But asked about growing attention being paid to competition concerns in the technology industry, Faida waved away any implications for his own business.
“I don’t think we as eyeo are affected by that in any ways,” he said. “I think just like anyone in the internet industry we have an interest that there is a level playing field for everybody and there is fair and open access for anybody, but I don’t think we’re affected.”
He was instead keen to emphasize that other ad blockers — i.e. other than eyeo’s own — make up the lion’s share of participants in the Acceptable Ads program.
“The Ad Block Plus product is one channel — our users can become part of the Acceptable Ads ecosystem, but they can also use all kinds of other products: browsers or other ad blockers that are participating in the ecosystem,” he said. “Actually, the majority of users that we have in the Acceptable Ads ecosystem comes from third-party products, not necessarily ABP.
“AdBlock Plus is just one channel how users can join the Acceptable Ads ecosystem. There are many other ways. Just like also on the monetization side, there are a lot of solution providers out there that can help publishers show an appropriate ad experience to those users that are opted in to see an Acceptable Ad.”
These options include rival ad blocker AdBlock — a longtime participant in Acceptable Ads — which also switched on the program for another major ad blocker, uBlock, last year soon after it acquired that rival product.
Competition questions being attached to ad-blocking are exacerbated by the fact it’s still not clear who bought the similarly named “AdBlock” product in 2015, when it had around 40 million users. Whomever the mystery buyer, they chose to switch on Acceptable Ads — giving a big boost to eyeo’s ecosystem. Later, they chose to switch uBlock’s circa 15 million users quietly over to the same default whitelisting program too.
“I think what we’ve seen is that Acceptable Ads have been adopted by all kinds of ad blockers regardless of the ownership structure,” said Faida when asked about consolidation in the ad blocker space.
“As I said before, the majority of the users of the Acceptable Ads ecosystem come from products that are not ABP. So I think from my perspective, it really emphasizes our approach and validates the approach to design this as an open ecosystem where all kinds of ad blockers can participate and bring in users to the ecosystem and all kinds of monetization solution providers can provide services to publishers — so this is one of the key aspects of the ecosystem that we’re building that users can come from all kinds of different ad blocking products or browsers.”
“We really want to be agnostic about which kind of ad blocker users are using,” he added. “And the model just makes a lot of sense, because it’s supported by users and it is a great economic model for ad blockers and publishers alike.
“What we started with when we started this is ‘can we find a middle ground between the ABP users and the publishers that want to monetise through ads?’ And over the years we’ve seen a lot of validation that this concept can actually work out because we’ve seen the opt-out with users is extremely low — we’ve seen a lot of traction among publishers. About 25% of the top 10,000 websites in the world now use Acceptable Ads. So we’ve seen a lot of validation and we’re ready to just grow this way beyond the reach of ABP and way beyond what we have started.
This certainly is reflected in the overall involvement of the company — we’re not just working on ABP. This is just one out of many channels how users can join the ecosystem and we have very ambitious growth plans which is also resulting in how we’re growing the company. We’re now close to getting to 200 people and we’re going to continue to grow.”
Since we spoke to Faida, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden has written to the Federal Trade Commission calling for it to investigate the ad-blocking industry — and specifically accusing eyeo’s whitelisting process of being “anti-competitive” and lacking in transparency.
The company sent us this statement in response to that development:
eyeo fully briefed the Federal Trade Commission in 2016 on what Acceptable Ads are and how we monetize; they understand exactly how we protect consumers against aggressive advertising. eyeo and Adblock Plus have been defending consumers’ rights since 2006 and we have stood up against Big Tech and aggressive advertising that stalks and tracks consumers across the web.
We are 100% transparent with consumers about how Acceptable Ads work, how we whitelist, how we monetize, and how to turn the Acceptable Ads option off (and thereby block all ads). While eyeo and Adblock Plus were the first to try and strike a fair balance between consumers and digital advertisers, Acceptable Ads has evolved into an open and transparent ecosystem with oversight by an independent committee which oversees the rules for Acceptable Ads.
We stand by Acceptable Ads and the compromise it strikes, and as a company seek to give consumers control over a fair, balanced web.
We asked Faida if eyeo had received a subpoena from the FTC related to its antitrust investigations of Google’s business and whether he had any concerns that deal terms between eyeo and Google might be of interest to regulators.
Faida said eyeo had not received a subpoena. “If they are [interested in asking questions about the deal terms] we’re happy to comply and provide any information that is of interest to the authorities,” adding, “we’ve already been through this process with some European antitrust authorities so we’re very confident that every agreement is fair and that there is no concern on the antitrust level.”
A committee for conflicting interests
Given how much controversy ad blocking generally invites — and, indeed, eyeo’s business specifically, given the company generates direct revenue by showing ad-block users whitelisted ads — it’s not surprising it took the decision to move away from setting the rules around what is and isn’t a so-called Acceptable Ad itself.
The company offloaded that standard-setting task to an external committee in 2017 that was made up of representatives of users, publishers and the adtech industry. Thus it’s not eyeo, but a collective of interest groups from the consumer and industry sides tasked with coming up with an acceptable standard. (It’s fair to say that without some kind of firewall, cries of “extortion!” would surely be deafening by now.)
Ben Williams, eyeo’s director of advocacy, describes the committee as “the critical cog in the machine,” without which he says there could be no “independent standards” nor “independent oversight of eyeo and its whitelisting service.”
According to Williams, eyeo’s “mandate is a bit like the legislative branch of a republic, in that it exists to pass laws (standards in this case) and oversee practices,” adding that the committee’s role “cannot be overstated.”
The comparison has, perhaps, a slightly unfortunate echo of Facebook’s own attempts to create a perception of independent oversight of its social media empire by offloading a subset of content review decisions to a “Oversight Board.”
The Acceptable Ads committee’s voting structure ensures that equal weight is given to the user coalition and the industry coalition, said Williams.
“The committee is set up by coalitions and purpose,” he told us. “The user coalition — which has an actual user, it has digital rights representatives — that coalition, because of upvoting and the way that it’s structured, has exactly the same amount of power as the for-profit coalition. So actually it’s a fifty-fifty split. They’re set up perfectly so that despite being more people on one side of it, the voting power stays exactly the same.”
“The way it was set up was to really ensure there’s a balance between what users are willing to accept and what publisher require in order to monetise well enough,” added Faida, who says the mission is to find and define the line where ads can exist in a way that limits how annoying and intrusive they are — so that even highly sensitive, tech-savvy ad-blocking users won’t be triggered.
This is important because users of products like ABP can always dig into the settings and turn off default whitelisting — which nukes even these apparently better-behaved ads. (Default settings have their own gravitational pull, as any app maker could tell you.)
“This is really the key of everything we do,” said Faida. “We need to find the perfect balance so that users are not opting out but that at the same time revenues are significant enough for the publishers. And the way we build up the Acceptable Ads program, I think it’s been a very transparent way where users can decide for themselves whether they want to be part of it or not. But also what we’ve seen is that users don’t want to interact with that a lot. So we need to find a standard that works for the users without requiring all kinds of configurations on the user’s end.”
Yet what’s acceptable is also likely to be mutable, which means goal posts can get moved.
So while eyeo seeks to claim credibility for its ad-filtering and whitelisting business by being able to point to a separate body it set up, it’s a claim tempered by the fact that its business interests are ultimately aligned with industry — it generates revenue from ads that get shown, not the number of ads blocked.
One person familiar with the workings of the committee told us that while they saw it as a genuine attempt to create an independent standard-setting entity, “I am unable to say at this time if it is a success or not,” they said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Video ads in the frame
For one big sign of the direction of potential travel, the Acceptable Ads Committee is conducting research to determine if there’s any type of video ad format that users will stomach.
For now, the standard blocks all video ads — but you can imagine how keenly the committee’s publisher coalition is lobbying for a video format to be let through, given higher CPMs for video ad views. Will all ad blockers signed up to eyeo’s Acceptable Ads be whitelisting a portion of video ads in the near future? It’s not yet clear. But the possibility is on the committee table.
Arguably, if this ad-blocking ecosystem becomes popular enough in terms of mainstream usage — helped to get there by Acceptable Ads being enabled by default by the most used ad blocking products (and via eyeo’s partnerships with mobile browsers) — then the make-up of the Committee’s user coalition could conceivably end up shifting. Thus it might become viable — or dare we say acceptable — to blur the line on totally blocking video ads.
Or, to put it another way, a more mainstream user base might swallow a lot more advertising than an early-adopting hardcore user ever would.
(It’s instructive that the industry Coalition for Better Ads vehicle generally has no issue with video ads, merely stipulating a few limits — such as video ads not auto-playing with sound when there’s been no user interaction when an ad is shown inline on a page of content.)
Either way, the reality of ad blocking is that it’s morphed, pretty quietly, into ad filtering by default.
And as more ad blockers get with eyeo’s whitelisting program, the incentive for others to join the dominant revenue-generating ecosystem also grows — a momentum that could then exert forces which reshape the standard to let more types of ads through.
Industry pressures around ad-funded content are certainly rising. Publishers are, for example, eyeballing a potential revenue crunch as third-party tracking cookies are being increasingly squeezed out by browsers (as well as tracking techs facing rising attention from European privacy regulators over consent concerns).
Faida himself voices some of these concerns — talking about how it’s becoming harder to fund and monetize “quality journalism,” a talking point that seeks to position eyeo as the strategic savior of revenue-strapped publishers everywhere. So how the sliders of Acceptable Ads shift in future remains to be seen.
An intent to move the line is evidently there, though, with the committee actively doing work with the aim of expanding ad formats — indicating that the direction of travel in this ecosystem is further away from firm or full ad blocks.
“The status quo [is no video ads being whitelisted] — and that’s why the committee is going to be working on that to figure out can there be a video ad format that is allowed,” said Faida. “Is there a video ad format that will be accepted by users?
“The committee is doing all sorts of research to answer that question… actually a lot of publishers would like to also see video ads included in the Acceptable Ads Program… so what the committee is doing now with a lot of research is figuring out is there a video ad format that is actually accepted by the users.”
“I think this is a great example of whether two interests, that are polar opposite, on the one hand users very much dislike video ads in general on the other hand most video ads they provide very high CPMs for publishers — so now the challenge is figuring out is there a middle ground?,” he added, putting an upbeat spin on what some might say is rather a classic zero-compromise situation.
Alternatives for sustaining online content
Squaring such a circle may sound impossible — but eyeo has another iron in the fire, having acquired micropayments service Flattr back in 2017. So it’s at least hedging its bets on how online content will be monetized down the line.
“What we really want to figure out is what is a sustainable way to monetize content in a user-controlled way? And for that, users need to have choices,” said Faida when asked how the product fits into the wider ecosystem it’s building. “You can already subscribe to Flattr… what we need to still work on is figuring out what exactly will motivate users to pay for content? There are a lot of companies in that space trying to figure out how can users be motivated to start paying for content. Especially those kind of users that don’t want to see any ads. And I think it’s important that we’re part of that.”
“The Acceptable Ads model works very well for the majority of our users, but we want to make sure that users have options of how they can be part of a healthy value exchange with publishers — and this is exactly why we are working on Flattr,” he added. “It’s because we want to figure out what exactly could be an alternative to advertising when it comes to monetize content on the internet. So the product that we’re envisaging is giving users the choice whether they want to allow certain types of ads or whether they would rather pay for content with a very seamless, monthly subscription that supports the entire web as an alternative to individual paywalls that publishers put up.
“This is the product we’re working on — and I think in the long term this is going to be a key aspect of the ecosystem we’re building — that users have real choice, how they want to be part of the value exchange.”
By blocking a proportion of ads, as it applies an acceptable filter, the net effect is to reduce the number of available ad impressions — which eyeo views as a mechanism for boosting the value of ad impressions.
“This, I think, is one of the key interests that we see on the internet right now,” Faida told us. “It’s becoming very hard if not impossible to fund high-quality content by simply showing ads. And this is one of the very fundamental things we need to solve — to establish an ecosystem in which fewer but more high-quality ads actually provide not just a better user experience, but also a more sustainable stream of revenues for the publishers so that the internet can remain open and free for everybody.”
Faida paints ad blocking as a positive for publishers that have suffered from the value they can derive from exposing users to ads being devoured by intermediating platforms that have come to dominant digital advertising.
“One of the key issues we’ve identified is there’s simply an oversupply of ad impressions, which means for years prices have decreased; the CPMs publishers can charge are constantly going down, which means individual publishers are kind of forced to compensate those decreasing revenues by allowing more and more aggressive ads. And this has created this downward spiral in which ads are becoming more and more aggressive and at the same time less and less valuable for publishers,” he said. “In our ecosystem there is scarcity, there is a limited number of ad impressions available, but in return those ad impressions have value again.”
It’s a self-servingly rosy picture, of course. Publishers aren’t exactly voluntary participants in paid whitelisting. They pay up because they would lose more if they didn’t — and swallowing a ~30% fee for the privilege of recovering ad impressions clearly feels a bitter pill for many.
Hence the volume of legal challenges eyeo has faced.
Unsurprisingly, Faida’s language is at its most euphemistic when asked about eyeo’s core business model.
“The model has always been that we’re helping publishers to increase their revenues by showing the right ad experience to the right type of user. So that regular users get a regular ad experience, users that are opted in to Acceptable Ads get an Acceptable Ad-compliant ad experience. So we’re helping publishers to facilitate those kind of different ad experiences — so as a result they’re able to very significantly increase their revenues. And this has always been our business model — we’re participating in the incremental revenues that large partners are generating as a result of working with us,” he said.
By contrast, he’s quick to criticize an alternative model for funding online content that’s being developed by the company behind the Brave browser — which also does ad blocking but seeks to disrupt the usual publisher-adtech value chain by serving ads from its own ad network, as well as devising a baked-in cryptocurrency-based rewards system for content and users who agree to view ads.
Faida paints this rival approach as not “a very sustainable” model.
“I think it’s setting the wrong value exchange by paying a large amount of the ad revenue to users. Because at the end of the day, the economics don’t support that this is a sustainable model,” he said.
“We need to be very cautious about what is the right value exchange here. And what we’ve experienced is that users obviously want free content and they’re willing to accept certain type of ads to fund that content and this is exactly the value exchange that we’re facilitating; publishers can run their own ads — we’re not blocking their ads and injecting our own — publishers can run their own ads but we’re helping them to adhere to the criteria as defined by the independent nonprofit Acceptable Ads Committee. Which we know are a great guideline to show ads that are accepted by users that installed an ad blocker opted in to Acceptable Ads.
“So I think we are building an open ecosystem and we are creating a value exchange between publishers that are providing free content and users that pay for this free content by seeing a certain type of ad — and that is a very different approach than what others are doing.”
Whether the claims of a sustainable value exchange for publishers pan out remains to be seen. Research put out by Pew last year looking at the U.S. market found newsroom employment continued to decline — with jobs shrinking from ~114,000 in 2008 to circa 86,000 a decade later.
In 2019, thousands more journalism jobs winked out of existence.
If ad filtering is going to save online publishing, it can’t point to hard industry data to back up its grand claims yet.
Looking ahead, there’s also the increasing fragmentation of internet users’ attention across more device types to consider — including voice-controlled gizmos, which may not even have screens to view ads, filtered or otherwise. What’s the sustainable content model going to be there? And what becomes of ad blocking?
“This is definitely going to be an interesting development,” said Faida. “We definitely see there’s a trend towards fragmentation as to how users access the internet and how they’re going to interact with it and we definitely want to make sure that we’re part of that by protecting users and giving them control over how they experience the internet.
“I would say the determining factor is how open is the internet going to be in the future? Is it controlled by walled gardens or individual companies that don’t allow third-party developers to develop tools that empower users to control their ad experience? But this is definitely why we want to be part of it and ensure users have control over their ad experience.”