Today, Adblock Plus, a free ad-blocking extension, posted a new filter on its website that will consumers to “re-block” Facebook ads on desktop.
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Facebook said the update will also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for users who are now using ad blocking software, in a bid to promote “creative, relevant, and interesting” ads. According to the aforementioned New York Times article, mobile ads generated 84% of ad revenue in Facebook’s most recent quarter. “Facebook’s goal has always been to make ads as relevant to people as the content they see from friends and family”, Facebook said in a statement.
The social network announced this week that it would still show ads on its desktop property to people who have installed ad blocking software. The fact that Adblock Plus is open source means that anyone can contribute to the software and present updates. But there are ways to configure ad blockers to stymie these efforts as well.
But, for now at least, there’s a way for ad blockers to continue to block ads on Facebook.
So will the social behemoth find a way to unblock ads on smartphones, too?
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.
“Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show-as some of these companies have invited us to do in the past-we’re putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls”, Bosworth writes. Williams tells The Verge that beating the system again “was just a matter of finding the non-standard indicators they began using” and then filtering them out.
Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth, VP-ads and business platform, called that arrangement a “moral hazard” in an interview earlier this week.
Ad-blocking and its proponents are in a never-ending arms race with publishers to outsmart their advertising. Other technology can “reinsert” ads that have been blocked.
“This is a cat-and-mouse game; so their next circumvention might come at any time”. But Facebook has found a way around this.
The new controls will allow users to manually remove certain preferences from their Facebook profile, ensuring that, for instance, they can opt-out of adverts on cats even if the site has profiled them as being a cat lover.
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To circumvent ad blockers in the first place, Facebook removed code that explicitly identified ads, making them appear more like regular Facebook posts (it was a behind-the-scenes change; users still saw a “sponsored” disclosure).
