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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

#121

Post by hajile »

rlidwka wrote: post #92
jerf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that argument is aging fast; it dates from before ad blockers were the increasingly big deal they are now. You've got two basic choices with a user who has demonstrated their passion to remove ads, spend money to play an arms-game race with the ad blockers to pound through their defenses, or directly make money from that passion, possibly an order-of-magnitude more money per user. Is it really so obvious that…

There is another basic choice: write a code that is intentionally incompatible with ad blockers. They can name an important navigation element "ad", so ad blocker will hide it for example. Then, when a bunch of users start complaining that the website does not work, point out that it's all ad blocker's fault (because without it everything works). I've seen a few precedents already.

That works for small websites, but big sites will simply have exceptions listed.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#122

Post by ryandrake »

curiousgal wrote: post #51
ryandrake wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

This doesn't just apply to this case but in general, you read about people tinkering with cool tools and coming up with great techniques whose only purpose is to track users in order to serve them ads.

No, I was talking about the "world's finest minds" part :-)

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#123

Post by Retric »

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.

Facebook is large enough for add blockers to specifically target them. So, at best this is going to cost a lot and drive away users for zero net gain.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#124

Post by swasheck »

“We’re doing it more for the principle of the thing. We want to help lead the discussion on this.”

I must not have been invited to that conversation where this discussion took place.

Also, I don't trust Facebook advertising because a few of their ads injected pictures of my friends' faces/pictures into them to make them more appealing (erm. deceptive) to me.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#126

Post by cocotino »

FT_intern wrote: post #83
Leynos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

is that why Google scrambles everything?

No, that's for bandwidth savings I reckon.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#127

Post by swasheck »

pseudointellect wrote: post #65
Leynos wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"while you were away" nonsense? A feature that shows you popular tweets from only people you follow. How is that nonsense?

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. This seems like a legitimate question.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#128

Post by golemotron »

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.

They don't have to win. All they have to do is stay ahead well enough to maintain a large target audience that can't be bothered to use the latest blocking technologies.

Absolute security is impossible but that doesn't keep it from being an arms race that has some sort of equilibrium. Ad blocking has the same qualities.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#130

Post by Bartweiss »

corford wrote: post #35
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…

A question: once site owners proxy ads through their own domains, will they become liable when they serve malware?

Right now the usual defense seems to be "we just buy 'em", but that's going to be a lot less convincing once Forbes.com is actively serving malware from their own site.

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