Facebook fights ad blocking

The Vice-President of Ads, Andrew Bosworth, wrote yesterday that Facebook will “begin showing ads for people who currently use ad blocking software.”

Andrew talks directly to Adblock Plus, without mention directly, and he says that “some ad blocking companies accept money in exchange for showing ads that they previously blocked — a practice that is at best confusing to people and that reduces the funding needed to support the journalism and other free services that we enjoy on the web. Facebook is one of those free services, and ads support our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected.”

Facebook ads are served as first party ads, so it is easy to hide them as ads for the ad blocking software. This doesn't happen so easily in programmatic, as the ads are third party, and difficult can be seen as content by the ad blocking softwares.

Adblock Plus says Facebook takes a dark path

The company that profits blocking ads exchanging with other ads, cutting the revenue to the content creators/publishers, says this is an unfortunate move. Facebook takes “a dark path against user choice”, says Ben Williams.