Adblock Plus today announced it will soon introduce functionality that allows visitors to pay for content on a website. The popular adblocker hopes to compensate publishers for the revenues they miss out due to visitors blocking ads.
The payment service was developed in cooperation with the Swedish Flattr, a company founded by Peter Sunde, better known as one of The Pirate Bay co-founders. The developers of Adblock Plus, the German company Eyeo and Flattr together take a 10% cut of what users pay to publishers.
"Users specify how much they wish to pay websites collectively on a monthly basis, rather than paying for articles or services on an individual basis", the Wall Street Journal reports.
The generated revenue is then distributed amongst the websites that users are most engaged to. Adblock Plus and Flattr are still working on an algorithm to determine what "engagement" actually means, beyond just time spent on individual sites
The program should become available to all Adblock Plus users by the end of this year. Adblock Plus has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
