Adblock Plus takes over micropayment service Flattr from Peter Sunde

Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, has acquired Flattr. The German company wants to make a hybrid of an adblocker and the micropayment service. Flattr was co-founded by former Pirate Bay administrator Peter Sunde.

Eyeo and Flattr have been working together for a year and they say they share the same goals in their projects. Eyeo then took over the company behind Flattr, which was founded by Peter Sunde and Linus Olsson. The collaboration led to the launch of the Flattr Plus service. With a browser extension, internet users can use this to automatically make micropayments from a predetermined budget to websites whose ads they block.

The acquisition should build on that, according to the announcement: “With the group of more than one hundred million Adblock Plus users and Flattr’s technology, we want to develop a new Flattr, a perfect hybrid of the two.” Flattr Plus is still in beta phase a year after launch and requires users to sign up. The goal of both companies was to funnel $500 million from users to publishers and online creators this year. It is unknown whether Eyeo is on track to achieve that goal or whether Flattr Plus will continue to exist.

In any case, Flattr will continue to do his work from his home country of Sweden and Sunde will remain connected as an advisor, while Linus Olsson will continue to run the company on a daily basis. An acquisition amount has not been disclosed.

Eyeo makes money with Adblock Plus thanks to the Acceptable Ads Platform. Website administrators can be whitelisted for a fee, and Eyeo then displays the ads from those sites that the company says are “acceptable.” The service is under fire from publishers in Germany, among other places, with claims of, among other things, distortion of competition and copyright infringement with the distribution of the adblocker’s filtering rules.