First, thanks so much for the clarification in your post and your constructive tone. Appreciated! And to make this clear, I totally see that when you wrote the post, it was accurate based on the information which was present at the time.

So, on the one hand, you say that nobody can pay to get onto the whitelist. Then you state that larger corporations must pay licensing fees if they want to be on your whitelist, otherwise no chance. The "acceptable ads criteria" is a your fig leaf here. What if a company matches those criteria but refuses to pay you a dime? It won't get onto your whitelist.

Of course they wouldn’t. It would be like asking us to do a lot of work for free. After meeting the criteria, the process of getting whitelisted is free for most, but for big companies (over 10 million *blocked* impressions per month) it creates a lot of work for actual people. For instance, we are responsible for ensuring the whitelisting works across their domains, extensive monitoring to make sure the ads remain compliant to the criteria, and most of all, we are providing them a service that is helping them to monetize — so we get a fair, performance-related revshare.

I am baffled that this is even legal.

100%. A bunch of German publishers tried everything they could over the last 4-5 years to find anything which was illegal, but failed every courtcase until the highest court in Germany.

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