Facebook And Its Battle Against Ad Blockers | TechTree.com

Facebook And Its Battle Against Ad Blockers

Due to the open nature of the web, Facebook is losing the war against ad blockers to stop functioning on the social network.

 

It is a well-known fact that a lot of the revenue that Facebook generates, is due to the ads it places on everyone's News Feed. However, with the trend of blocking these ads picking up and users looking to have ad-free personalized experiences, the case of ad-blockers is obviously up against Facebook, which has been trying to win a losing battle.

Even when the Facebook Highlighter is installed, ads in the News Feed are greyed-out, and the words 'this is an ad' appears, but it is something that now has a technological war with Facebook as opponents, according to a recent report published on The Times Of India. There has been a team of researchers, who have actually created an experiential ad, which shows that Facebook may not triumph this time around. 

Adblock Plus happens to be the biggest ad blocker currently in operation. They just informed users, that a simple tweak in settings would ensure that the Facebook anti-ad blocker mechanism is defeated. In fact, Arvind Narayanan from Princeton University, US, explained, "What is happening here is that, Facebook's HTML code for ads has slight differences from the code for regular posts, so that Facebook can keep things straight for its own internal purposes. But because of the open nature of the web, Facebook is forced to expose these differences to the browser, and to extensions such as Adblock Plus. The line of code above allows Adblock Plus to distinguish the two categories by exploiting those differences."

According to the details furbished by the 'MIT Technological Review', researchers have already managed to create a prototype tool that doesn't depend on Facebook's hidden HTML code to distinguish Facebook ads for the users. It has capabilities to look at those parts of the web page which are most prominently visible to users.

On previous occasions, Facebook's Ad Highlighter would scan through any posts and block any content with the 'sponsored' tag, but this tool goes one level up and ensures there is no ad to spoil one's 'Facebooking' experience.

Image via Telegraph


TAGS: Facebook, Ad Blocker

 
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