Facebook is taking a significant step against the rising popularity of ad blocking software. They have just announced that they have developed a way that will stop ad blockers from working on their sites. The technology identifies users who have ad blocking software on their desktop, and then displays the ads using the same method that is uses normal content.
While ad blockers could, in theory, scan all the content on the entire site to determine what is real content and what is an ad, that would be very difficult, and something ad blocking developers aren’t likely to do.
This is a new way to combat ad blocking. Other companies (Google) has paid ad blocking software developers to ‘whitelist’ their ads. Other platforms have stopped showing content to users with ad blockers until they either disable the ad blocker, agree to watch specific ads, or pay a fee for the content.
This new method may very well catch on quickly given that it is less intrusive, and likely more effective than most other options.
Facebook is only implementing this on their desktop version of the site.
While most users are on mobile these days, desktop ads still bring in nearly a billion dollars in revenue each quarter. Facebook said that at this point, mobile ad blocking is not a significant issue for them so they aren’t implementing this technology. Whether that will change in the future will be seen.
