You’ve always been forced to view ads to download addons, hell Cursforge before twitch made you pay for an update all button.
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maybe its high time Blizzard made an “official” add-on manager.
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No it isnt. Sorry if you’re lazy.
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Id imagine it would be a subscribe to turn off adds thing tbh.
They actually track your app usage and sell your data to third party companies. For example, right now Overwolf is selling data that is being used by NewZoo, which is a market research firm tracking PC video game usage.
You can see here in their help article:
The PC games data available within the Newzoo platform covers a variety of metrics and insights into the engagement of PC players and the performance of games.
The core PC game metrics are obtained through our partnership with Overwolf. Overwolf is a tech company based in Tel Aviv, Israel. They developed an overlay software that allows gamers to install apps that can be used in-game. They have 300+ specific apps for specific games. The Overwolf data sample best represents the male core PC gamer aged 15 to 35.
Source here: http://help.platform.newzoo.com/en/articles/4345617-pc-engagement-data-methodology#:~:text=The%20PC%20games%20data%20available%20within%20the%20Newzoo,a%20tech%20company%20based%20in%20Tel%20Aviv%2C%20Israel.
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No, because I accept my CPU & GPU cycles be used for add-ons. The author of the add-on also gets no money from my CPU&GPU cycles.
The ads don’t give me anything and are not something I want or need. Overwolf does get money from them too, which is bad.
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Wowhead does not monitor their ads. It’s been proven many times they allowed hostile ads to be hosted on their site. They’ve since fixed most of it, but it happened for YEARS until it blew up the WOW forums and they finally addressed it.
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No, Overwolf will not allow you to opt out of ads.
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will never happen, why pay for something people are doing for free.
No one said you couldn’t profit off addons. They said you can’t charge for addons which they don’t. If you guys want to “profit off addons” argument then all patreons should be shutdown as well.
Agreeing to pay is still payment.
Overwolf is a great deal different.
Wowhead is at least exists within the confines of your web browser, which is reasonably safe as long as you’re using up to date Chrome/Firefox/Safari and have an adblocker. Overwolf runs directly in Windows/macOS and has the much wider access that comes from being an independent program, making it much more dangerous.
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I really miss the early days when wowhead didn’t have adds. 
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Yes. It’s atrocious. It’s literal adware at best.
And for the record, Wowhead absolutely did have malware for years but they recently still cleaned up that site big-time.
That was in 2018. It is now 2020, my dude.
I’ve never once watched an ad on the Curse App OR the Twitch App.
Ads on those were always opt-in. They default to opted in, but you were able to disable them. As such, it is not profiting off the addons, as people have a way to opt out of it and thus make things completely free.
No different than how some addons got away for years by making the addon free but charging for the scripts to make the addon work.
Overwolf is not giving that option.
My wowhead doesn’t have ads 
it tries to pity me about it, but i won’t give in.
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What payment ? Add-on authors get 0 money from their add-ons running on my computer.
Overwolf’s ads however results in payment to Overwolf from using my CPU&GPU cycles.
How is this complicated to understand ?
Agreed. But they also like to implement things that the addon community create.
The other side is things where people have options (recount/details or bigwigs/dbm) - what becomes the ‘official’ one. If blizz was to run an addon manager they would surely just implement those things into the game directly.
The twitch app itself was an ad.
And the curseforge app had ads right on it.
I mean, I’m like 1200 Reputation away from free premium on wowhead anyway.
An add on is not free of charge if you have ads on it. Perhaps Blizzard needs to make that clear.
They are receiving monetary compensation in a go around way