Since 2018, eyeo has been organizing a yearly Adblocker Developer Summit to provide a platform for the ad-blocking community, and to work on future ad-blocking innovations and promote knowledge sharing with some of the most amazing speakers the ad-blocking community has to offer.
After meeting in San Francisco in 2018, and in Amsterdam in 2019, the Adblocker Dev Summit Orga team has decided this year to go fully remote. Not only does this ensure everyone’s safety in light of the recent pandemic, this choice has the added benefit of opening up the conference to even more people since traveling is not needed.
Nora Hase, event manager at eyeo, is responsible for the organization of the summit and explains what our participants can expect from the event and why going fully remote makes the Adblocker Developer Summit even more awesome..
Nora, why did you make the decision to go fully remote with the Adblocker Dev Summit this year? What were your thoughts and what benefits come with the decision?
We started planning the event at the end of 2019 and by spring 2020, when we were in full swing of booking locations and catering and such, we realized that Covid-19 would impact us. We first thought about postponing the event until the end of the year but quickly realized that having a remote event would be the safer option. It was a bit challenging for us to replicate the networking aspect, which is of course very important, but we will use different tools to give the attendees the opportunity to engage with each other. And having a fully remote event comes with a lot of benefits as well!
What will be different this year?
I think the biggest change is the accessibility. The event always has been free of cost for all participants, nevertheless, no matter where the event takes place, people have to travel and that can become quite a huge barrier for some to attend. With the Adblocker Developer Summit being online, we are now able to host an event that is not only accessible to everyone – even time zone limitations are no problem, as we will record all talks – but also has a significantly lower CO2 footprint than in the years before.
What are your highlights?
The highlights are definitely the talks. We have so many exciting talks and experts. So, for instance, our CTO Stephen Hardisty will give the opening keynote and will give an overview of where ad blocking is and what challenges and opportunities lay further down the road for it.
Another talk that I personally look forward to is the history of Webwasher – how ad blocking started by Sören Müller. The very first ad blocker ever.
The Firefox team will be talking about the future of content blockers on Firefox, and the Chrome Extensions team will be doing the closing keynote, where they will give an overview of Manifest V3 and what they think the future holds for ad blockers on their platform.
This year will be a summit full of highlights, with an excellent agenda that we really look forward to and with more speakers and more participants than ever before.