Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) announced today it can now work its way around ad-blockers, allowing its advertisements to appear without any restriction whatsoever.
At the same time, the social media company giant will update its ad-preference tools for users to remove themselves from specific customer lists and as a result, avoid determined ads.
Facebook’s trying to improve advertising experience
The post, written by Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of ads and business platform, vows to improve its advertising experience.
Boz explained that online activity has become more immersive and intuitive, but many digital ads haven’t evolved at the same speed as others. In consequence, there’s always annoying ads out on the web frustrating the content users are trying to read.
For that and more, Facebook has been working on understanding people’s concerns and expectations with online ads. And it came to the conclusion that users don’t want disruptive or irrelevant ads as well as having control over the ones they want to see.
Therefore, FB has introduced tools to enable them to personalize their ad preferences so they can remove interests and stop seeing certain types of ads.
Ad-blockers are bad for business
About ad-blockers, Bosworth that while relevant and well-made ads can be useful, not all of them work that way and have led people to turn to ad blocking software to tackle bad ads and, in the worst case scenario, to stop visiting certain websites or apps. Facebook is apparently trying to avoid both situations.
Thus, Facebook will strengthen the HTML of its web ads so ad-blocking software can’t distinguish a status update from a sponsored ad. The block-blocker technology will only be available for Facebook’s desktop website as mobile browsers, and apps are out of reach for now.
This practice reduces the funding needed to support journalism and other free web services like Facebook. So rather than paying such fees, Mark Zuckerberg’s social service will empower users with its updated ad preferences and controls.
Although Bosworth denied this action was business-motivated, billions in revenue from many of the world’s biggest Internet companies like FB and Google come almost entirely from advertising. This type of business model has been threatened by ad-blockers, hence the urge to evade annoying ads keeps increasing. Large online publishers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have already seen its advertising revenue decline.
Last month, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that 26% of American Internet users currently use ad blockers on their desktop devices. Meanwhile, PageFair, an industry leading anti-ad blocking initiatives, revealed that 200 million people worldwide use ad-blockers on their desktop computers. Also, an additional 420 million people use them on their smartphones.
Source: Facebook Newsroom