a preference towards text-only content. The announcement generated controversy both on Adblock Plus's website and on social media sites like Reddit. In 2012, Adblock Plus's managing director Till Faida told the Swiss newspaper Thurgauer Zeitung that the "strategic partners" on Adblock Plus's whitelist would not be named, but that the partnership is part of the company's "Acceptable Ads" whitelist project. In February 2013, an anonymous source accused Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant of offering to add his site's advertisements to the whitelist in return for one-third of the advertisement revenue. In June 2013, blogger Sascha Pallenberg accused the developers of Adblock Plus of maintaining business connections to "strategic partners in the advertising industry", and called ABP a "mafia-like advertising network". He alleged that Adblock Plus whitelisted all ads coming from "friendly" sites and subsidiaries, and promoted their product using fake reviews and pornography. Faida responded to Pallenberg's accusations, stating that "a large part of the information concerning the collaboration with our partners is correct", but that the company did not see these industry connections as a conflict of interest. He said that the company is convinced that the "acceptable ads" business model will be successful and says that the whitelisting criteria are "completely transparent". He also stated that "We have an initiative called Acceptable Ads to support websites with unobtrusive ads. Every website can participate. The [Pallenberg] article on purpose just slanders our good name". Attacks were made in 2016 against ad-blocking with paid whitelists—though Adblock Plus was not mentioned by name—by content providers who provide content free of charge to users, deriving revenue from advertisements, and by industry and government sources who criticise the "unsavoury" business model, which has been described as a "modern-day protection racket". In May 2016, Adblock Plus parent company Eyeo began a collaboration with the online donation service Flattr to create a service that would allow users to automatically donate money to online publishers based on their engagement. The service was conceived as a way for users to automatically support online publishers as an alternative to advertising; Eyeo would acquire Flattr outright the following year, seeking to expand upon this model as Flattr's main service. In September 2016, Eyeo announced that it would launch a "marketplace" for ads that meet its acceptability criteria. "Acceptable ads" Starting with version 2.0, Adblock Plus started allowing "acceptable ads" by default, with acceptable ad standards being set by The