There's an obvious irony here: An ad blocker doing advertising.
And not just any ad, a pop-up ad. The Adblock Plus website even promotes that it blocks "tracking, malware, domains, banners, pop-ups and video ads."
A handful of people tweeted about being served the notification:
Time to uninstall @AdblockPlus. Don't abuse notifications for spam and advertising (even if it is self-promotion). pic.twitter.com/rdOBotKYoq
- Taylor Simpson (@iLama) September 25, 2015
Something about Ad Block pushing a notification just doesn't seem right #irony pic.twitter.com/w2WuFf4IoB
- Stephanie (@SBteph) September 25, 2015
Adblock Plus just spammed me with its own popup ad for the smartphone version of Adblock Plus.What's a better desktop ad blocker?
- Jeff Noxon (@jnoxon) September 25, 2015
adblock is giving me a popup which is advertising adblockgg adblocker
- Topi Y (@tuhkakuppi111) September 24, 2015
AdBlock+ just used Chrome's HTML5 notification mechanism to advertise AdBlock+ to me.
- mfollett (@mfollett) September 25, 2015
"We have not run any ads on any of our users. We felt a notification to people who use our product telling them about another product (Adblock Browser) was just Adblock Plus communicating with our users, and we use that format from time to time with important announcements. An in-app notification is not an ad, and I'm hoping that you understand that.
If some users don't want to know about Adblock Browser and were annoyed by our notification, they can always opt out of ever getting another ABP notification again."
But it goes to show that it's easy to bash online advertising ... until you have something you need to promote.