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Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#31

Post by topspin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #13
rmi_ wrote: post #4

I am really interested in the technical details. I think we have yet to see a working (and practical) approach to this.

I can think of a few simple tricks already. One: Host from the main facebook.com domain, either inserting it in the basic html page response from the server, or from an API / content location that cannot be predicted. (ad calls should be indistinguishable from 'normal' content calls). Two, do the same with content locations, so no 'div id="ad"' or anything like that. Should be easy enough.

"Host from the main facebook.com domain..."

If true I believe that this would actually be an important improvement. This removes some plausible deniability regarding malware and other abuse; Facebook (or whomever else adopts this scheme) must guard more carefully against abuse when the content is coming from their own domains, as opposed to some third party.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#33

Post by jerf »

Why not just allow users to pay to not see ads?

It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#34

Post by tomcart »

I'm a little surprised they would announce this as a thing they will do in the future, rather than something they've already succeeded in doing.

Either they're arrogant about their ability to implement this (which may be well founded), or they're really doing it to assure less savvy advertisers that they're trying as hard as they can...

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#35

Post by corford »

SEJeff wrote: post #5

Good luck. I suspect in no time uBlock Origin will have found a way to remove the ad elements from the DOM, even if they are served directly with the html of facebook and not a 3rd party domain.

It's going to be hard for facebook because they're such a big target.

I think where ad-blockers will start to have problems is with the millions of lesser known sites. Once these publishers swap over to proxying ad-content through their own domains and using a handful of simple evasion tactics (random file name for the self hosted JS file that pulls in the ad, site specific pseudo-random DOM element names for the ad spaces, not using an obvious sub-domain to load proxied ad content from); stopping ads getting through is going to require a lot more effort than blacklisting a few ad-server domains.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#37

Post by DanTheManPR »

jerf wrote: post #33

Why not just allow users to pay to not see ads? It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.

A big issue with paid subscriptions is that it dilutes the strength of the ad network, since you're specifically excluding desirable target customers.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#40

Post by davidgerard »

douche wrote: post #26

I already have a whole set of CSS rules I apply to Facebook now, just to make their UI less awful, remove the massive amounts of crud I never want to see, and resize the few things that I do want to see up from their stock postage-stamp sizes. Blocking .ad-unit or #pagesYouDontCareAbout is easy.

Social Fixer helps a lot.
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