How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#1

Post by ganderzz » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 12:50 AM UTC

How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers
dylanpaulus.com

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#2

Post by crakenzak » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 3:55 AM UTC

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly.

What do you guys think?

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#3

Post by oferzelig » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

So you're basically against ad blockers.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#4

Post by DevKoala » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

I agree. If you are using their platform, then you have to abide to their terms of use.

I don't use Facebook for this reason.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#5

Post by dannyr » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:06 AM UTC

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

I dislike Facebook but using it means you should agree with how they monetize their business.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#6

Post by shmerl » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:06 AM UTC

Sounds like if CSS could allow matching by patterns, it could still block it out? I.e. something regex / wildcard like? Though performance probably would suffer.

More advanced ad blocker can probably use some AI, that could be trained with user's hints about what is an ad. Or it can use some OCR for that purpose. If you can recognize that it's labeled "Sponsored", so can ad blocker potentially.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#7

Post by dannyr » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:08 AM UTC

oferzelig wrote: post #3

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

So you're basically against ad blockers.

If a business chooses how they make money to survive, can you just say "I don't like how you make money so I'll just get everything for free"?

If you don't like how a company uses ads (regular, spammy, deceptive), no better way than tell them than by not giving them any traffic at all.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#8

Post by oferzelig » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:09 AM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #6

Sounds like if CSS could allow matching by patterns, it could still block it out? I.e. something regex / wildcard like? Though performance probably would suffer. More advanced ad blocker can probably use some AI, that could be trained with user's hints about what is an ad. Or it can use some OCR for that purpose. If you can recognize that it's labeled "Sponsored", so can ad blocker potentially.

It's tricky even for Javascript.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#9

Post by squeaky-clean » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:09 AM UTC

oferzelig wrote: post #3

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

So you're basically against ad blockers.

You can be in favor of both sides of this argument, I would say I am. I believe in my right to modify what's running on my computer and network, including things like installing adblocker extensions and pi-hole and so on. But I also believe that no organization is obligated to serve their data to me in a way that makes it easy to block those ads.

They are wasting CPU hours and man hours on obfuscation features rather than real value to the end user. But nothing is really wrong with that, it's just a bit silly. If they think it makes them more profit overall than actually enhancing Facebook, they can take that bet. (I think it's the wrong bet, but they can still take it)

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#10

Post by glofish » Tue, Dec 03, 2019, 4:12 AM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #4

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

I agree. If you are using their platform, then you have to abide to their terms of use. I don't use Facebook for this reason.

What if the company does not make it clear what the terms of use are - wich covers pretty much 99.99% of face book users.

They trick you - you trick-em back.