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If you're an average web user,Animation Movies | Adult Movies Online chances are you've never heard of the ad exchange Rubicon Project -- even though you likely interact with its services every day.

The company places automated ads across more than a million websites and 20,000 mobile apps, but until now, its business dealings have -- like most platforms of its kind -- mostly been relegated to back-end work with its advertiser clients.

SEE ALSO: Ad blocking usage is up more than 10 percent from last year

But as the growing popularity of ad blockers signals that consumers are fed up with the status quo in online advertising, Rubicon is looking to come out the shadows. It now wants to reach out directly to the people viewing its ads in order to give them more control over what type of products and services they see and how they're tracked from site to site.

Its first step in that transformation is a new browser plug-in released in a beta version (currently on a request-only basis) this week. Cheekily titled "Project Awesome," the sleek new tool lets you hand-pick a profile of interests that provide a better sense of the ads you'd like to see, filter out ones you dislike and save others to revisit later.

The program not only controls ads placed by Rubicon's own platform but those across all desktop web services, including within Facebook. The company is also planning a follow-up tool that will work inside of mobile browsers and apps.

Rubicon is not the biggest ad exchange of its kind on the web, but it does command a respectable portion of the market with ads that are seen by around a billion people per month.

Set-up starts with a "gamified" selection process in which users choose from a cascade of video clips meant to represent various topics of interest.

The format is actually a bit cumbersome and obtuse; none of the clips are clearly labelled and many overlap in subject matter, and the program inconveniently makes you hover over a video for the entire duration in order to select it.

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It's much easier to skip the interest stream altogether and simply select from the alternative word cloud layout.

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Eventually, you're left with a rainbow wheel of personal interests which the service should then theoretically use to tailor the ads you see.

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You can also hover over individual ads to block, "snooze" -- make them disappear for a set amount of time -- or save them.

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Rubicon is hoping the customization panel will provide a persuasive alternative to the blunt-force instrument approach preferred by most popular ad blockers.

"This is a nice in-between," Rubicon Project CEO and founder Frank Addante told Mashable. "Maybe I'm an optimist but I generally think that people do want information ... as long as it's something they're interested in."

Some consumer studies seem to support that view. A survey of ad blocking users conducted by Adobe and anti-ad blocking firm PageFair this fall found that while respondents generally held the quality of online ads in low regard, four in five said they would appreciate them more if they included relevant personalized offerings.

Yet that glimmer of hope was largely overshadowed by more grim news for those who make their living off online ads: the popularity of ad blockers is still growing at a fairly rapid clip.

That reality has forced the digital ad industry to reckon with the fact that their products are too often clunky, intrusive and sometimes even actively malicious.

That soul-searching has led to several initiatives somewhat similar to Rubicon's aimed at cleaning up the online ad-scape. Last year, an industry trade group unveiled a set of recommended guidelines for more consumer-friendly ads along with a mea culpa for not having acted sooner.

More recently, a trade group of publishers launched a first-of-its-kind nonprofit exchange designed to provide a more transparent alternative to the often murky and unaccountable world of automated ad trading.

But Rubicon's new tool represents one of the furthest steps towards actually handing the control panel to consumers. In fact, the extension more closely resembles a customizable ad blocker than it does any of the services offered by Rubicon's peers -- though the company would prefer the extension be thought of as a filter rather than a blocker.

"We look at this as an industry-wide solution," Addante said. "This is not just one product -- we're trying to start this conversation -- get the industry to focus on the consumer experience first."

Once the extension is past its beta stage, Rubicon plans promote it with a marketing campaign and, potentially, ad overlay banners similar to the "Ads by Google" labels that appear on the search giant's third-party placements.

Addante says the project has been in the works for more than two years, and its launch marks the beginning of Rubicon's wholesale shift to even more consumer-focused services.

"Eventually I see a product like this moving into television as well as the Internet of Things among, other things," Addante said.

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