What a busy week it has been for ad blocking. “Ad blockers are a blunt instrument, which is why we’ve instead focused on building tools like ad preferences to put control in people’s hands”.
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Shares of Facebook (FB) were lower in mid-afternoon trading on Monday as Wells Fargo analysts say the social networking giant’s recent move to bust ad blocking on its desktop site shows how much the software hurts the segment.
In a blog post, Adblock Plus’ Ben Williams, wrote: “This sort of back-and-forth battle between the open-source ad-blocking community and circumventers has been going on since ad blocking was invented; so it’s very possible that Facebook will write some code that will render the filter useless – at any time”.
Despite Facebook being a net worth $350 billion company with countless resources and developers, the main expected reason for Facebook to win this game of Cat and Mouse with ad-blocker developers Is the simple fact that it removes posts from the user’s sight. “All of this must be utterly obvious to the smart engineers at Facebook, so the whole “unblockable ads” PR push seems likely to be a big bluff”.
“But there’s a limit to what Facebook can do”.
Eyeo, which created one of the largest leading ad-blockers Adblock Plus announced a few hours after Facebook’s blocker for ad-blocking was released, that they had developed a workaround to counter this and all users had to do was to go update their software on their site.
Right now, it’s easy for users to identify ads in their feeds, through visual and text cues, and Adblock Plus and other similar tools can scan the HTML code of the pages to identify ads.
When Facebook stated that they would start incorporating code to block the use of ad-blockers.
Research conducted for Facebook by Ipsos Connect found people resort to ad blockers to avoid disruptive ads (69 percent), ads that slow down the browsing experience (58 percent) and security and malware risks (56 percent).
This the first time Facebook has attempted to circumvent the software that strips ads from websites, joining the advertising industry’s fight against ad blockers.
Facebook also asked its users to identify which ads they do not like to allow the firm to collect in-depth information for marketers.
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The code for the Chrome extension is available on GitHub.
