Facebook Will Force Advertising On Ad-Blocking Users (wsj.com)

Long-time reader geek writes: Facebook is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software (Could be paywalled; alternate source). The social network said on Tuesday that it will change the way advertising is loaded into its desktop website to make its ad units considerably more difficult for ad blockers to detect. "Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they're not a tack on," said Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of engineering for advertising and pages.

Comments

Good

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Challenge Accepted...

Re:Good

[Wycliffe]

Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook? Facebook is 100% about selling its users to advertisers. I'm surprised it took them this long. This really says less about facebook and more about ad blocking software. The only reason facebook is likely doing this now is because a larger percentage of their users are starting to block ads.

Re:Good

[the_Bionic_lemming]

I don't go to facebook, but I do like a challenge.

Re:Good

[Kjella]

Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook? Facebook is 100% about selling its users to advertisers. I'm surprised it took them this long.

Because everybody else does, it takes two to be social. Which is probably why they haven't done it earlier, annoy a critical mass of users and they might switch to an alternative. I guess they feel confident enough about their position that you might whine and complain but nobody's going to organize a revolt, there's not even an obvious competitor as Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat etc. are all quite different from Facebook.

Re: Good

[AmiMoJo]

They really are that clueless. From FTA:

What weâ(TM)ve heard is that people donâ(TM)t like to see ads that are irrelevant to them or that disrupt or break their experience. People also want to have control over the kinds of ads they see.

What is this, 1997? Sure, people don't want irrelevant ads, but they don't want to give you their preferences or be spied on either, so good luck with that. All ads are disruptive, otherwise they would be ignored. The only control they want is an "off" button, which you are now trying to break.

Re: Good

[MitchDev]

"Won't work. If a website gets aggressive, ad blocking is doomed to fail"

Or that website is doomed to fail.

Facebook isn't just Zuckerberg's baby anymore, it's gone corporate.

(The same thing that destroyed Vegas)

Re: Good

[Aaden42]

Easy. AdBlockPlus Element Hiding Helper. For one, you could block on any 'img' or 'a' tag that had a 'href' or 'src' starting with data:. Next up, you can block by CSS class or DOM ID of any element. If there aren't any identifiers, you block an XPath to the element's location, relative to any other ID's element if necessary. I haven't met an ad that ABP+Helper can't block.

And if none of that works, I close the website & don't come back. I've been *this close* to deleting my FB account since the day I opened it, so it wouldn't take much of a reason to just replace my profile with an email address and "email me if you want me."

Re: Good

[fluffernutter]

But that doesn't answer my question. Facebook actually talks like there is a way to show an ad to a user and benefit them. When in reality, the best experience is an ad-free experience. There is no way to make ads 'an experience'. That's like saying you can benefit people at a beach by taking away half of the mosquitoes.

Re:Good

[Fire_Wraith]

It's an interesting chicken/egg question. Are they failing because they refuse adblockers, or are they failing already, with that being just a symptom? I know my anecdotal experience has been to stop visiting those two sites ever, but I'm possibly an outlier.

Now, it's a reasonable argument that anyone using an adblocker wasn't helping their revenue stream to begin with, but that may be too simple an answer. Even adblocked pageviews have value to a site, because people don't simply read web pages in a vacuum. They share stories with their friends, that might not otherwise see them. Cut off the adblocked portion of the internet audience, and you're reaching a lot less people, and that's where you lose the pageviews that pay you. I would also posit that internet users that employ adblock are more likely to be active/heavy users of the internet, but that's conjecture on my part.

Re: Good

[nealric]

Yes, people do want control of the kind of ads they see. For me, that kind is none at all.

What if I don't use FB ? EOM

[Anonymous Coward]

N/T

The age of subscription services

[npslider]

Will this lead to a paid version of Facebook, that allows paid subscribers to see less or no ads?

Re:The age of subscription services

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably. Which will then lead to a new Facebook program to allow advertisers^W content producers to push their stories to the top of the newsfeeds of the paid version...

Re:The age of subscription services

[Bender Unit 22]

Some of my local newspapers starting blocking people who uses adblock, which I use because of the ads(duh) and the 3rd party tracking.
So I asked them: "If I subscribe and pay for access to your full site, will I then be able to see the site ad free as well as free from trackers?".
The answer was: "no".

Ok then, bye..

Re:The age of subscription services

[npslider]

The newspapers are doing this because they are in decline. Every form of mass media is saturated with advertising, The value of ads is going down, as we are become so used to them we are blocking them out like the sound of the train in the background.

Re:The age of subscription services

[Megane]

On the other hand, the ads in dead tree newspapers don't sing, dance, cover the non-advertising content, or attempt to install crap on your computer. In my experience the few sites that actually run their own ad servers tend to have non-annoying ads (for instance, hackaday), but most whore themselves out to ad wholesalers who will sub-whore out to other ad wholesalers, the latter of which are often the ones with the lowest standards. The real bottom-feeding scum are the ones that are used by piracy sites like TPB, but I think they expect their serious users to block ads anyhow.

Re:whatever

[lawaetf1]

LOL.. yeah, "social pariah." Goes to show just how far down the rabbit hole you've gone. why don't you try stepping away from the screen once in a while. Join a club. Volunteer. 95% of your "friends" on facebook are anything but that.

Re:At the risk of getting downvoted into oblivion.

[npslider]

On today's Internet, an Ad-blocker does more to protect your computer than traditional anti-virus software. What a world, what a world...

Not My Problem

[sjbe]

Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they're not a tack on,

A) Yes the ads ARE tacked on after the fact. B) Facebook being ad supported is Not My Problem (tm). If they want to negotiate a deal directly with me for cash money whereby I will no longer block ads I'm willing to have that conversation but it won't be cheap. Certainly will cost them more than the shitty services they currently provide. I will actively fight anyone who thinks they have a right to put advertisements in front of me without my explicit permission.

Why use FB? It's a social network

[Bruce66423]

It's a way of staying in touch with your friends. It's a way to keep in communication. It's a way to share positive experiences and reach out for support when life kicks you in the face. It allows you to announce things 'safely'; a friend announced the death of his uncle on facebook without having to go through the emotions of telling people face to face.

It's not necessary, but it has become a useful tool in our culture.

Re:Why use FB? It's a social network

[TheGratefulNet]

this will sound elitist (but I don't care) - anyone I can't reach via email or other non-single-company-is-an-internet methods is not worth staying in touch with. there is phone, email and real life ways. some people enjoy texting (I don't).

you are basically lazy, I suppose. you want everyone on one site. I don't. I see no value in that, to be honest. I see the lock-in and the privacy invasion and I stay in touch with REAL friends via email and in person.

fuck fecebook. you think you need it but you'd be surprised how much you can get along fine (better, I would argue) without it.

Re:Why use FB? It's a social network

[coastwalker]

I have taken a break from my account since October 2015 so totally agree. Tell you what Zuckerberg fuck off with the extra advertising. I wont be back unless someone finds a way to turn it off. Also if your company is only accessible on Facebook, well you can fuck off too.

Re:Why use FB? It's a social network

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always stayed in contact with people via:

face-to-face interaction,
phone (landline, cellular, VOIP),
email, and
snail-mail.

I always prefer face-to-face or phone for real-time communication.

I don't use social networks, especially Facebook - the details of my life are not a commodity, and I won't have my personal information bought and sold.

Re:Why use FB? It's a social network

[SirSlud]

And before that, there were telegrams! And before that, there was mail!

Re:Why use FB? It's a social network

[AthanasiusKircher]

Unlike email vs telegrams, Facebook adds nothing that didn't already exist before (in email, instant messaging, newsgroups/forums/mailing lists, websites, etc) except ads.

That's NOT true. I'm absolutely NOT a fan of Facebook (and frequently go several months between checking on my account -- I only keep it because there are a few people who seem to only know how to use Facebook to contact people now; they can't figure out email anymore), but the social media experience of Facebook is distinct from all other things you've mentioned.

Namely: you can broadcast information to a specific group of people (your "friends" or subgroups of them), while simultaneously also allowing them the option to "tune in" or "tune out" as they wish.

To do this with previous tech, you'd have to do something like set up a specific email list with all of your friends AND have them simultaneously set up email filters so they could control when they saw your messages (rather than just getting spammed in their inbox by your random posts). AND they'd have to do that for each of their friends individually.

But that's not even it -- because the ability to respond to posts by friends (and have them be visible to specific sets of people) couldn't really work with previous tech without a lot of configuration. Facebook is probably closest to a concatenated set of private blogs from all of your friends (where the typical blogpost is rather short, but you can post comments), but again that wasn't really easy to set up with previous tech.

Again, I'm not a huge fan of the Facebook experience, but it does lead to a different sort of interaction compared to previous social media.

Re:Seems Reasonable

[AchilleTalon]

You are totally wrong. Every user on Facebook generates revenues even if he uses adblockers. The reason is simple, because every user interact with others and keep others interacting with him and among these others there is some who are not using adblockers. That's the essence of social media. The attraction phenomena is driven by the users themselves. If you start to lose users, you are starting lose market, no matter if it reflects immediately on your revenues or not.

Re:My civil disobedience

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Sometimes you have to hang up on them, they won't quit.

Oh no, I make them hang up. They called me, so now they've become my prey. They're in my arena now, lol. And I've got all day to fuck with them and talk about their mom is banging the goat next door.

Sometimes I mimic their accent, which REALLY seems to enrage them. Or I just go over and over how they're "stuck in a shitty chair in a shitty cubicle", and how I'm making more just telling them to piss off than they can even if they work a 12-hour shift.

Sometimes I'll make them listen to a few selected youtube videos, or I make them wait on a hold for a while. But either way my goal is to force them to hang up, and I always win, always.

Ads cost money for the receiver.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that in the current environment, where more and more ISP's are charging big money for going over their arbitrary bandwidth caps, nobody is discussing the amount of bandwidth wasted in downloading ads and, even worse, video ads. You should be paying me if you want to use my bandwidth to try and sell me something. Luckily, my current ISP does not cap my bandwidth, but why should I be expected to subsidise any web site's need to make money with ads that are increasingly becoming bandwidth and CPU hogs and are simply ruining the web for everyone. The over-abundance and the sheer resources that many of these ads require is the reason that many people are blocking them in the first place. Why should it take a minute to load a web page with less than 1000 characters of actual content? The marketing people have simply gotten out of hand. There is a real cost to receiving these ads and nobody is dealing with that issue.

Re:whatever

[OzPeter]

95% of your "friends" on facebook are anything but that.

95% of my friends on FB are relatives that live on 3 different continents.