uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#301

Post by tomnipotent » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:27 PM UTC

rented_mule wrote: post #265

tomnipotent wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.

The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per…

The further away you get from direct marketing where you can track conversions, and the further up the funnel you go, the less and less analytics help. Another way to think of it is that there are tranches of spend - the central tranche is easily attributable direct marketing but there's a limit to how much you can efficiently spend, but the further from the center you go the less effectively you can measure the efficacy of the spend but there are more options to absorb ad dollars.

Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.

So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.

You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#302

Post by shiandow » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

Good4boothee wrote: post #167

hollow-moe wrote: post #55

This doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.

I dread the day YT finally decides it is cost effective to embed ads directly in video stream. I think Twitch is/was experimenting with it.

I kind of hope it pushes people to use alternatives, because allowing your work to be violated by ads seems insane.

But probably not.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#303

Post by GuB-42 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

wkjagt wrote: post #164

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…

First thing is that Facebook makes money by showing ads, not by selling the product shown on the ad.

Second thing is that besides a small minority of people who refuse to buy advertised products out of spite, some would be blockers still do if the ad get shown. Maybe less than those without ad blockers, but still more than zero.

Third thing is that the point of advertising is not just direct sales. Some companies put up ads just to "take space", to establish themselves as leaders in their sector and not let others in. That's why you see som much advertisement for Coca-Cola. They don't expect you to buy a can of Coke just after you have seen the ad, you probably already have some in your fridge anyways. But by doing that, they make sure that when you want a drink, you think about Coca-Cola and not something else.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#304

Post by cryzinger » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

sicktriple wrote: post #254

dewey wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".

[flagged]

> If youre referring to whether or not Meta "cares" of you click and ad or not, then fair play. I'd argue that's more or less semantics, but ok, they do care and there is indeed an entire industry built on them caring.

This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#305

Post by charcircuit » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

wkjagt wrote: post #164

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…

>someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway

This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#306

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

gopher_space wrote: post #268

gh02t wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.

One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-…

[deleted]

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#307

Post by enragedcacti » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #226

sicktriple wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space. The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they d…

That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".

Ad placements can still appear to perform if the targeted user was already planning to buy the product and Google/Meta attribute the sale to the ad impression they shove in at the last minute. FortNine (a Canadian motorcycle gear retailer) published an expose and seem quite convinced that this is an extremely common occurrence. It would also justify why Meta would be so aggressive about showing ads even to an unreceptive audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#308

Post by A1kmm » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

Or an unauthorised access / exceeds access to a computer system prosecution in at least one jurisdiction somewhere around the world.

If the owner of the system has a 'no ads' policy and a security mechanism to prevent ad servers from accessing their display without their authorisation, it is one thing if a company accidentally circumvents that by changing their page in a way that breaks detection (and unless there are records it was deliberate) they probably get the benefit of doubt from authorities.

But if they are blatantly going to quite great effort to circumvent the adblock security system to exceed their unauthorised access without the consent of and against the wishes of the owner of the client system, surely that's a clear-cut criminal case?

Of course, prosecutions of these types of things in many countries unfortunately tend to go after individuals who target big companies, but almost never the other way around.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#309

Post by Marsymars » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

jonesy827 wrote: post #170

Marsymars wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. Sure, but that relegates my old but perfectly functional macbook to the trash. There's literally no functional alternative to fb marketplace for getting used goods re-used at any kind of scale.

Craigslist?

Effectively non-existent in Canada. Kijiji nominally exists, but I dual list everything I'm trying to get rid of on both kijiji/facebook out of principle and get like 20x more interest on facebook.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#310

Post by dofm » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

This is the correct decision, IMO.

I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile).

I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink.

Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.