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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

#131

Post by amyjess »

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.

The next step then is for uBlock to use a machine learning algorithm to analyze the rendered page and hide anything that resembles an ad.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#132

Post by epmatsw »

It's really interesting to me how strongly people dislike actions like this and the "Please turn off your adblock" thing. If this were a physical store, it's the equivalent of you taking something and the owner saying "hey man, that's not free, this is how I make a living". It seems like the right response would be "Oh wow, sorry, I won't take that any more", not "Go away, you're bothering me, and I'm going to keep taking this". I love me some adblockers, but it's sometimes hard to reconcile blocking ad-blocker-blockers ethically (and from a politeness perspective) in my own mind.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#133

Post by Bartweiss »

laurent123456 wrote: post #62
corford wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 would also mean that when sites end up buying malware-laden ads, they'd be serving them off their own domain. I'm not sure what consequences that would have (legally or with search engines and browsers) but I'll bet it's not pretty.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#135

Post by fratlas »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #111
recursive wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I love the human condition. Managers struggle to motivate for simple coding tasks, but ads? We'll be damned if they intrude our lives.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#136

Post by jegutman »

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 thought most ad blocking right now depends on the fact that ads are served from different locations than the sites themselves. You can try to block native ads being served by the same stuff that serves the page, but it's reasonably more difficult and prone to false positives.

There's a separate issue that as they try harder to block ads they will also make it less clear what's an ad. For example many ad blockers don't work on google search results because they're fed back with the result content, but it also becomes less and less obvious what's an ad and what's a search result on google.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#137

Post by aantix »

gorhill wrote: post #117
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.

> 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.

Just realized that you're the author of uBlock..

If you can't filter on classes or id's, what else? Dom element ordering? Image size properties? Structure of ad text?

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#138

Post by ionised »

untog wrote: post #100
creshal wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway, so I don't really see the problem. That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity.

> That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity. It's not. Ads can be entirely successful without a click - sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. "Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway" is a pretty naive view of how the ad industry operates.

> sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product.

All it does is make me avoid the product out of spite.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#139

Post by Bartweiss »

amyjess wrote: post #131
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.

The next step then is for uBlock to use a machine learning algorithm to analyze the rendered page and hide anything that resembles an ad.

I wouldn't hate this, even if it's imperfect - the most common false positives would be brand-pushing content I don't want even if it's not actually paid advertising.

Re: Facebook will force advertising on ad-blocking users

#140

Post by swang »

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 such a big target that it won't matter what they do. People will write an adblocker for it because it's Facebook.

If there was a viable path, they would have already done it. I think Facebook has enough engineers there where they know going down some obfuscation path is futile.

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