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: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...

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..

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: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: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: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.