In addition to making sure you never miss posts from friends and family, Facebook wants to make sure you never miss another ad.
The social network has announced plans to make life harder for ad blockers that let desktop users view Facebook without seeing irrelevant advertising.
Goodbye, Ad Blockers
Facebook has revealed a change that will use new technology to make ad blocking software less effective. Facebook is changing how it loads advertising onto its desktop site to make its harder for ad blockers to detect their ad units.
“Some ad blocking companies accept money in exchange for showing ads that they previously blocked – a practice that is at best confusing to people and that reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web,” Facebook wrote in a blog post. “Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected.”
This change won’t impact mobile, which accounted for 84 percent of Facebook’s $6.2 billion in advertising revenue in Q2.
New Advertising Controls For Users
What about users who want an ad-free experience on Facebook? Well, Facebook doesn’t want that. But the company says it will give users “more control” over the ads they see.
“If you don’t want to see ads about a certain interest like travel or cats, you can remove the interest from your ad preferences,” Facebook said. “We also heard that people want to be able to stop seeing ads from businesses or organizations who have added them to their customer lists, and so we are adding tools that allow people to do this.”
Estimates of how many people actually use ad blockers varies by country and by which company is putting out their own report. But most estimates land somewhere between a quarter and a third of Internet users. Facebook didn’t indicate how many of its users use ad blockers.
What do you think of Facebook’s move to block ad blockers?
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