Facebook finally responds to the adblockers

Facebook has finally responded to the unstoppable spread of ad-blockers, a reality it will have been evaluating for some time, but that until now it had kept silent about. Most analysts agree the company is an innocent bystander in all this: its advertising formats are not intrusive, but given that most users with an ad-blocker use them indiscriminately and don’t bother checking whitelists, Facebook now has a growing number of users that look at its pages but don’t see the advertising there.

Facebook’s response has been as simple as it has been effective: by making the HTML of its advertisements indistinguishable from the content on its pages, making it impossible for blockers to identify advertising and block it. This is one way to force users to see ads and bypassing ad-blockers in the process.

The first thing to note here is that Facebook’s move shows how widespread ad-blocking is nowadays. Google’s approach has been very different: it has talked to ad-blocking providers and convinced them that its advertising is not intrusive, paying so that plugins classify Google ads on the whitelist by default, something a user can change if they wish (although Google tends to periodically change the format of its advertisements to allow them through the blockade, obliging users to engage in a game of cat and mouse to keep their screens free of advertisements.

Facebook has preferred to avoid playing this game, and hasn’t cut a deal with anybody and has done what it can wit the means at its disposal, eliminating the distinction between advertising and organic content, between what users do and don’t want to see. Obviously, this is something that a few chosen like Facebook can do: the social network controls both sides of the equation: the ads?—?with its formats?—?and the content itself. If it wants to do anything from now on, that will involve the use of new technological developments in ad-blocking, in all likelihood related to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Looking at Facebook’s announcement more closely, it’s clear that the company is saying that it relies on advertising for its revenue and looking at content without seeing the ads is breaking the rules and we’re not going to let you do that, but we will give you the tools to make your advertising experience as amenable as possible.

If you don’t want to see an ad, you can click and then explain why, and then configure your filters to regulate the kind of advertising you see.

From the company’s perspective, these kinds of metrics are essential: if an advertisement is rejected systematically by a lot of users, then it simply becomes to expensive to advertise, which very possibly means that the advertiser will change their strategy to try to generate less rejection, depending of course on what the reasons users give for doing so.

Facebook’s idea is to make the terms clear for its customers: advertising is part of what we do, so you either use our network with advertising included, or you don’t use it, while offering some elements that allow people to control things a bit more, as well as providing information about the experience and the feelings generated.

From the perspective of somebody who sees himself as an innocent bystander and not the offender, this seems a reasonable enough response. But there is nothing written in stone here and the situation is changing as we speak. Challenging developers to block your advertising when you eliminate the elements they used to recognize it is a sure way of generating innovation in this field.

(En espa?ol, aquí)