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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.
Challenge Accepted...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If facebook continues to make its site user-unfriendly, I'll simply stop using facebook. I've already dropped back on my usage because I cannot view my timeline the way I want to view it, i.e., facebook keeps shoving things it considers to be "important" in my face, things I don't care about. If facebook starts doing the same thing with ads, I'll just move on.
Will this lead to a paid version of Facebook, that allows paid subscribers to see less or no ads?
Just now, when Facebook has started losing users for the first time in its history, and more and more people are turning (finally) to adblockers for self-defense against malware and data charges (also thanks to the ongoing lawsuits in different country against AdBlock), Facebook finally announces that it will inject more ads.
Yeah, I guess with this shovel digging their own grave will become much easier.
Whenever FB puts an adv. in my feed I flag it as being Offensive and Sexually explicit. It may not screw FB over by much to do so, but it makes me feel good.
(Kinda like yesterday when I strung the Indian "computer support" guy along for 15 minutes by pretending to poking around my windows machine. In the end he asked my what browser I was using, and when I said Safari he swore in his native language and then hung up on me)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
How else am I going to farm my pixels? I have to keep harvesting them every day
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.
CommentBot 0.7a running with args "-module irritate,disagree -target random"
On today's Internet, an Ad-blocker does more to protect your computer than traditional anti-virus software. What a world, what a world...
Once it becomes Illegal to disconnect your neural implant from the 'Net' you will have no choice but to view endless ads 24 hrs a day, awake and asleep. The day is coming.
And we though the survivalists were preparing to escape people with guns... no it's to avoid the mandatory ads, ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court decision of 2022 under the individual mandate...
Maybe someone will come up with a HOSTS file solution? Do you think it is possible? Nah...
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.
You have every right in the world to ditch facebook, but you will become a complete social pariah in 2016 doing that.
If you actually believe that then you probably are severely lacking in real world friends. Just because someone "friends" you on Facebook doesn't actually mean they are your friend. If your "friends" treat you like a social pariah for not looking at their banal Facebook scribblings then they probably aren't someone you really need to be spending time interacting with anyway.
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.
Wait, you "accepted the challenge" and then passed the buck on to somebody else? I do not think that phrase means what you think it means. :-)
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.
Achille Talon
Hop!
As long as F.B. Purity works, I will be on Facebook.
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
Sorry FB, you can go shove it. The blockers will find a way. The industry must change or it will collapse under its problems.
Silence is a state of mime.
I wonder if, in forcing users who are blocking ads to load them anyway, Facebook is willing to accept liability for the inevitable occurrence of embedded malware infecting users through a browser exploit. This is no joke: we know for a fact that ads containing malicious code have been served to users, who then have their systems compromised. If Facebook makes money from selling these ads to users, then they should have a legal obligation to not circumvent ad blocking software as a security measure.
Of course, Facebook and its customers (read: the advertisers) will accept no such responsibility for their shitty security practices. It's all on the users. It's your fault, and yours alone, if there are any negative consequences of choosing to share information about yourself through the site; your fault if your system is compromised through an advertisement that hides malicious code, even if you try to protect yourself by blocking ads. And while many people who refuse to use Facebook (myself included) on principle might say caveat emptor and that you don't have to use Facebook, the practical reality is that that horse has long since left the barn and that the only logical position for ourselves is to protest Facebook's practices, because if our acquaintances get hacked, that has clear ramifications for the security of our own personal information even if we did not share it with Facebook.
Didn't you have ads in the 21st century? Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
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.
"15 million facebook users infected with malware in a popunder ad."
A good ad-blocker should let the page think it is being rendered exactly as requested, but actually removing the display of the ads to the user.
What manner of Javascript trickery or feedback loops do large site owners use to try to get around that?
It seems like the paradigm needs to be a sort of sandbox for the page and its anti-adblocker scripting, and then the page is delivered to the user sans ads completely unknowingly to the page.
I guess the one thing Facebook could do to make it very hard to remove the ads is to make them look exactly like a user post. you would need a sort of fingerprinting as another poster mentioned to get around it.
95% of your "friends" on facebook are anything but that.
95% of my friends on FB are relatives that live on 3 different continents.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Facebook will have as much danger facing liability for malware as Microsoft faces for botnets.
Big BIZ is immune and deaf to the cries and powerless threats of the little man.
Big BIZ owns the government and keeps it in the folds of it's deep wallet.
Bug BIZ gets what it wants, and we are at best an ant on it's road to profit.
Unless a sizable percentage of users check into Facebook Unanonymous and successfully complete detox, nothing will change anytime soon.
is are you going to stop using Facebook. It's child's play to break adblockers. Just serve the ads up from your site instead of with an iframe.
/.ers will stop. But I'm guessing the general populace won't. I know one of my buddies who's a table top gamer absolutely hates facebook but lives with it because that's how tournaments and even pickup games are organized. Back in the 'good old days' you showed up at a store and got a pickup game. Now it's all coordinated over Facebook.
A lot of
You might be thinking "Well, there'll be an ad free social network, I'll join that!". Go ahead. If you can't get everybody on it then it's useless. Google learned that with G+. Meanwhile your cut off from a significant portion of society. You can bitch & moan all you want that those folks are sheeple but it doesn't change the practical reality of the situation.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I have yet to find a site with ads that I can't block...
Unless they are going to embed the ads directly in user photos that I want to see facebook can blow me.
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.
The CEO of a company I once worked at remarked at a social event that some famous person was a friend. I said to her "You mean you actually know her or they are a name on a list on a social networking site?". She sheepishly said "Facebook". I didn't get fired.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Can APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit block ads that come from the same domain of the content?
For example, if I'm visiting "https://example.com", and it serves ads sourced from "https://example.com/ads/", can APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit block them?
Because that's what Facebook is going to do to try thwarting ad blocks, including thwarting APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I predict I will be able to go back to my ad-blocking ways in less than 24 hours after this.
I really see no reason to support the ad supported business model. Most of the internet's history shows that ads have been a burden on the proper functioning of the network, and ad revenue was not a significant contributor to the maintenance, function and expansion of the internet. I laugh in the face of anyone who tries to convince me that removing ads from the Internet will be the downfall of the service and of civilization. (to be fair, I live in Silicon Valley, so the people I interact with are usually micro-CEOs for some nonviable pipe-dream start-up)
If you want to operate a business online, great. If you want to send virtual flyers to your repeat customers who opt-in, fine. Do I need every video player and social network covered with CSS overlays for ads? no way!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Now maybe people will finally start using Google+ instead!
I will turn off my adblocker for your site if
1 ads are STATIC IMAGES ONLY (text ads are fine and you may script ad swapping/updating) ..)
2 you take responsibilty for the content of the ad (no outsourcing to an outsourcer that
3 this includes paying to have my system rebuilt if a bad ad gets served to me
4 give me the capability to block types of ads i do not want to see (yes you can datamine this info as you would like)
oh and clearly separate ad content from "real" content
A true manager in the making!
It's amazing how 20 years ago everyone looked down on anyone who sat at a computer on bulletin board systems all the time. Now everyone's doing it, it's OK. F*cking hypocrites.
Social media is not being social. I recently told someone this and they gave me a blank stare. You have to go out and meet people face-to-face and put your damn facebook app away. I'm personally not on facebook and never will be.
That explains why I see less posts from people...
Fewer. You see "fewer" posts from people.
You can have less milk or gas or oxygen but not fewer.
You can have fewer chairs or bullets or pillows, but not less.
This concludes the Grammar Nazi(tm) post on "Countable and Uncountable Nouns" for August 9th, 2016.
We now return you to our regularly-scheduled flame-throwing, already in progress.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
95% of your "friends" on facebook are anything but that.
For some yes for others who don't have a metric shit ton of "friends" it is likely that 100% of their friends on facebook are real friends or relatives who they actually like. It is actually fairly useful for keeping in contact with far flung real friends in an almost broadcast like manner. It is also really useful when planning a get together of 12 people who are spread across 6 contents and 7 countries. That said I only have about 35 or so Facebook friends and they are either relatives or were friends in real life long before Facebook.
Time to offend someone
Ha ha ha ha ha.
People hate advertising.
Ad blockers allow people to endure some services. Without them, the choice between being harassed or not using the service seems trivial.
Bar a couple of exceptions, any service that asked me to disable my adblocker just got me closing the page and looking for the next choice.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
I experimented with advertizing on FB for my small business and found that it was effective for getting "likes" and "shares" but not conversions into people even visiting the website, let alone using it. When I looked at the pages of the people liking and sharing, it became apparent that they were almost all the type of people who like and share dozens of posts per day, so their friends probably unfollowed their posts long ago. The ad algorithms are obviously tuned to maximize your payment to FaceBook while appearing to give you good results (yay! look at how many likes and shares you got! you're practically going viral!), so they seem to intentionally show your ads to those types of people. If you have a useless site with attention-grabbing click-bait images and "news" entertainment that makes money off of stuffing tons of additional ads on the site itself, then maybe it is worth advertising on FB. But if you are trying to advertize a legitimate product or service, FB does not seem to be a very cost-effective way to go.
The thing is, facebook needs to make a 'target' (a site that works around ublock origin and hosts solutions), at which point, developers will tear that target down. Right now, facebook is ad-free if you have the filter on your display-device. When that changes, a new filter will be made. Everyone saying stuff like "oh it's super easy to stop ad blockers" don't realize that the fundamentals are, a remote server has a document, and you display it locally according to a set of your own rules. They don't control your CPU, or your monitor, you do. You can work around a given ad blocker. Then there will be a new ad blocker. Etc.
Too bad this is still at 0 and not modded to -1. AmicusNYCL hasn't built such a thing. He's pointing out that it would be incredibly hard. In the past Ad Blocking was relatively simple as the ads were served from ad networks rather than from the actual site you are visiting. So there were pretty simple algorithms to block them. Facebook is different because they can run their own in-house ad network and present the ads the same way as their native content. The only way to block this would be a cat-and-mouse game of trying to figure out which page elements are the advertisements on any given day.