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Facebook takes aim at ad blockers
Hannah Kuchler in San Francisco
Facebook is taking a stand against ad blocking by introducing technology to make it harder for people to avoid seeing its advertisements, as it claims increasingly popular ad blockers are bad for publishers and users.
The world’s largest social network is also encouraging users to identify which ads they do not like and to tell the site which ads would interest them, allowing it to collect more in-depth information for marketers.
Andrew Bosworth, vice-president of ads and business platform, said ad blockers took an “all or nothing” approach, whereas Facebook was hoping to find a “middle ground”, by allowing users to report irritating or irrelevant ads.
On Tuesday, Facebook users will be presented with new options at the top of their news feed, showing them what Facebook thinks they like — from triathlons to coffee — and which advertisers are using their contact information to target them on the network.
“As we offer people more powerful controls, we’ll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software,” he said.
Many marketers have seen Facebook as a way to avoid the risk of having their ads blocked, as ad blockers cannot disrupt ads on the mobile app due to its natural design, which tightly integrates content and advertising. Facebook generates 87 per cent of its revenue on mobile, but it is now making changes to ensure its desktop ads cannot be disrupted either.
The social network joins media companies who are already trying to find ways to protect online revenues from ad blocking. People using ad blocking software who visited the New York Times website in March were told “the best things in life aren’t free” and were asked to disable the ad blocker or pay for a subscription.
PageFair, which helps publishers overcome ad blocking software, estimated that more than 200m people now use some form of ad blocking on their laptop or desktop, and so do 420m of the world’s 1.8bn smartphone users.
Mr Bosworth said ad blockers were bad for free services such as journalism funded by advertising, and Facebook. He said it was also bad for the users of the software, as some ad blocking companies allow advertisers to pay to show ads they previously blocked.
Facebook commissioned a poll by Ipsos Mori of 2,000 people in five countries, which found Germany and France lead the world in ad blocking, followed by the US. Almost 70 per cent of users deployed the software to avoid disruptive ads, with 58 per cent worried about ads that slowed down their browsing and 56 per cent concerned about the risk of malicious software.
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