Ad Blocking Company Banks By Taking Money for Ads it Supposed to Block (GOOG) (MSFT)

Causing controversy today is a report from FT.com that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Taboola have been quietly paying off popular ad blocking company, Adblock Plus, so their ads can show.

While the details are confidential, FT said it has confirmed the existence of the deals.

Google and Amazon declined to comment. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which runs search engine Bing, said to the FT, "Microsoft will always give consumers choice when it comes to advertisements. We are committed to working with partners who share out vision..."

The report suggests Eyeo, the German company behind Adblock Plus, business model is to operate a "whitelist" of ads that are not blocked. Websites can join the whitelist by meeting certain criteria. The whitelist is free for small websites and blogs, while lager websites get charged a fee. While Eyeo declined to comment on how much it makes, an anonymous digital media company said Eyeo asked for 30% of the additional ad revenue that it would be generated from unblocking the ads.

Needless to say, today's report is causing outrage among users of the ad blocking software. "Corporate Sellout" is how one user simply put it.

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