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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

#111

Post by JulianMorrison »

recursive wrote: post #75
aantix wrote: post #6

FB can't win this cat and mouse game. If the ads are to be distinguishable then there will be inherent properties that will lead to them getting blocked.

I think you're making some assumptions here. The logical end-game is that FB writes their own rendering engine in javascript and targets a single canvas element, handling all the interaction events themselves. In fact, I think it can go significantly further than that. Ad blockers will need to get much fancier to deal with that kind of weaponized ad delivery.

If FB tries this, the awful performance of their site will start putting a drag on their business.

But also, adblockers will keep up. If they have to use canned deep-learning neural nets to catch and crush advertising based on how it looks rendered, they will.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#112

Post by jcoffland »

RexM wrote: post #105
gramstrong wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook already owns my personal data and any content that I publish. Why should I also have to look at ads?

What's the value of your personal data and content if they can't use it to target ads to you?

What's the value of FB of it does not have people's personal data on it?

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#113

Post by hajile »

recursive wrote: post #75
aantix wrote: post #6

FB can't win this cat and mouse game. If the ads are to be distinguishable then there will be inherent properties that will lead to them getting blocked.

I think you're making some assumptions here. The logical end-game is that FB writes their own rendering engine in javascript and targets a single canvas element, handling all the interaction events themselves. In fact, I think it can go significantly further than that. Ad blockers will need to get much fancier to deal with that kind of weaponized ad delivery.

As long as greasemonkey is available, it won't be possible. If it gets too bad, then a custom jscodeshift script could manually edit the functions in question.

Ultimately, there isn't a good way to dictate what a user does when you're in a sandbox.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#114

Post by cjmcqueen »

daturkel wrote: post #56
potatolicious wrote: post #14

Honestly, I don't really mind so long as the ads are being served by FB and not third-party networks, and their performance isn't abysmal. The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're tryi…

I may be in the minority here, but I don't mind Facebook ads particularly because they track me so much that the ads are very well-tailored. There's nothing annoying to me about relevant advertisements and I've found decent stuff before. The ads for crappy pay-to-win flash games in the sidebar, on the other hand...

Your tailoring from Facebook might be unique or mine is. I find the stuff they serve up just plain wrong. Or, it's one sided and I see the same ad over and over and over again.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#115

Post by cgriswald »

ultramancool wrote: post #71
laurent123456 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proxying ads would be a big security risk though since it means they would run within the same sandbox as the rest of the page, which might be why it hasn't often been done yet.

It'd also be a big risk in that it'd be easier to cheat the ads as they'd all come from the same connecting IP. I doubt advertisers would appreciate that much.

Indeed, proxying is basically pointless. At that point, it would be better for the site and for the advertisers (and users who don't block ads) for the site to simply self-report. At least then they avoid the extra overhead and load times (which might, btw, be detectable by ad blockers).

Alternatively, advertisers could host a server on the site's domain. A subdomain or specific path would be easily blocked, but a random path wouldn't be, e.g. http://www.example.com/626164776F6C66/ with identifier generated randomly. Plenty of existing content already looks this way.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#116

Post by potatolicious »

daturkel wrote: post #56
potatolicious wrote: post #14

Honestly, I don't really mind so long as the ads are being served by FB and not third-party networks, and their performance isn't abysmal. The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're tryi…

I may be in the minority here, but I don't mind Facebook ads particularly because they track me so much that the ads are very well-tailored. There's nothing annoying to me about relevant advertisements and I've found decent stuff before. The ads for crappy pay-to-win flash games in the sidebar, on the other hand...

Generally agreed, though the industry's obsession with retargeting makes this annoying sometimes. Facebook is much better targeted than most, especially when it comes to interests/hobbies/brands I'd be into, but it's still very crude if it tries to get any "smarter" than that, especially with retargeting.

Retargeting: the ad technology that believes my home needs 54 couches and 36 vacuum cleaners.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#117

Post by gorhill »

Leynos wrote: post #30
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.

uBlock can already do this (I use it for hiding the Twitter "while you were away" nonsense), although I suspect that the next step is Facebook scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern.

> scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern

That's why I have been beefing up the DOM filtering code in the latest versions -- there are already sites doing this.

There is a lot of untapped potential with the new operators, I am waiting for opportunities to put them to test, and fine-tune them if needed.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#118

Post by obsurveyor »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #87
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.

With Facebook they can serve ads as if they were a regular story, there wouldn't be anything structural, not even image names/sizes, to go on then.

Unless they start misrepresenting stories, you could setup a plugin that keeps track of your friends and only display content from them.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#119

Post by delta1 »

hodder wrote: post #89
lopatin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: Why do you block FB ads? I wouldn't say that FB ads are any more disguised as content as, say, newspaper ads. And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?

"Serious question: Why do you block FB ads?" Because I dont like looking at ads.

It seems so obvious
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