There is quite a complicated love-hate relationship between content engineers, adblockers and everyone else for a long time now with no end in sight. However, this time Facebook has decided to actively pull its weight by making it difficult for adblockers to block ads on its platform. Facebook announced that they will allow you to customize the type of ads you want to see. For instance, if you don’t want to see whitening product ads or ads from organizations and businesses that have added you to their customer list, you will be able to remove the interest from your ad preference. Facebook will be adding tools to improve the way you view ads and give you control on how your data informs the ads you see.
All this sounds good but although Facebook plans to do this, the probability of this being successful is low. Generally, most people don’t want to be marketed at at all and even more so when Facebook is asking you to give them more data on your preferences in a roundabout way, just because you don’t want to be annoyed. Facebook said, “As we offer people more powerful controls, we’ll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software. Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show – as some of these companies have invited to do in the past – we are putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls.”
Now, how would Facebook bypass adblockers other than these customizing options? Technically, Facebook is able to by creating its own custom coding that embeds ads into its platform by making it the same format as its content stories. By doing this, adblockers will have to block the entirety of Facebook itself to block the ads. Facebook is pretty smart in this sense. By making ads unblockable on its platform, Facebook is encouraging online media sites to publish on Facebook, generating more content, views and of course, more information for Facebook.
Source: Facebook Newsroom
