Ad-blocking community finds workaround to Facebook

adblockplus.org

12 points·bambax··4 comments

I sometimes advertise on Facebook as well. It's good to see which pictures work and which do not.

However, I don't like that Facebook is showing/pushing my ads to people that do not want to see them. That's not good for ROI.

I don't think I will ever use it on a large scale for that reason.

In addition, people who use AdBlock have tracking pixels, often different analytics systems, also blocked. For you, as an advertiser, they go into a black hole. Even if they convert.

I wonder how Facebook thinks it can fix this problem besides telling trust our stats. It's actually beneficial to advertisers if both FB and your landing page are adblocked.

Short term practically, Facebook should just pay the AdBlockPlus "we've determined your ads are non-intrusive" ransom.

However morally an arms race seems to be the best mechanism to stop users ripping off ad-supported content. Ultimately ABP and similar software's main effect will be to ensure that ads look more like other content, come from the same CDNs, share similar URLs, etc, which is probably the opposite of what the rippers want. FB is better funded than ABP (for now anyway) so they can probably win that race.

At this point ABP will have to use natural language processing rather than DOM manipulation to actually determine what content is an ad.

The ABP's "we've determined your ads are non-intrusive" ransom doesn't work that straight forward and even if ABP added FB to the list, the EasyList isn't the only ad blocking list there is.

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