Ads are a way for several sites to make money but to users they are just annoying. Thus the use of ad blockers. However the Adblock Plus application has not been working on the Facebook platform because of the efforts that the Facebook engineers have been putting to not let it happen.
Facebook announced that they would circumvent ad blocking tools a while ago, and when they did, the Adblock Plus tram built a workaround on the rule in two days time. They boasted at the time that they had promised that the open source community would have a solution to ads soon. Facebook last broke the Adblock Plus workaround a month ago, but it seems their messages for marketing are still being seen by viewers.
Apparently, even though the Adblock Plus extension has the final say on the contents that will ultimately appear on your screen, it hasn’t been able to build fast enough filters so as to block the Facebook content.
The parent company for ABP, Eyeo’s communications and operations manager, Ben Williams said that the company needed to make a deeper and drastic change to the way it kept on fighting Facebook. He said Facebook had managed to eradicate every identifier which would be noticeable on the first level of the ads. He also noted that in the future, Facebook ads might not be as distinguishable as those that cane from the company itself.
Williams also noted that his company knew something like this would eventually happen. Telling reporters he said that firms such as Facebook played according to a playbook so they certainly were prepared for something like this to happen.
However, this is in contrast with what Williams he wrote in a blog post posted earlier last month that mentioned how users were supposed to remember that there were some gigantic companies such as Facebook which seemed unstoppable, but if in any way Facebook tried to circumvent the block, the open source community would create another.
However, ABP is now saying that they need more time to get back at Facebook. The software has to be changed and we have to be careful about it, Williams said. There has to be some tests and he noted that though Facebook had managed to remove the parent elements pf the ads code, they would still be able to block using the child code, though they were a long time from that.
ABP has in the meantime, created their own ad exchange named the Acceptable Ads platform. The service gives websites the chance to serve some privacy safe ads which ABP would not block in viewing to their 90 million plus users of browser extensions. All this would be for a six percent cut. The money will be needed especially if they are going to fight a giant which makes close to $2 billion in quarterly profits.
