The Digital war of 2016: Facebook vs. Ad blockers

Doesn’t it seem like yesterday when Facebook got excited about waging a war against Ad blockers and found a way to bypass these blockers and serve ads to their users? For those of you who don’t know, a couple of weeks ago Facebook announced that they are making changes to the HTML of their web ads so that they are indistinguishable from the organic content and can slip by ad blockers. Read more on this here. 

Not anymore, ad blockers have found a way around it!

Adblock Plus has added new filters that can dodge the ads and become a nightmare for social media marketers.
Adblock Plus spokesman Ben Williams said in a blog post : “Well, that was fast.”
To this Facebook immediately issued its own statement claiming that the method Adblock Plus is using hides some of the ordinary posts as well. Facebook further added,

“We’re disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook. These new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and pages. This isn’t a good experience for people and we plan to address the issue.”

The statement further continued, “Ad blockers are a blunt Instrument, which is why we have instead focused on building tools like ad preferences to put control in people’s hands.”

Plenty of online publishers and advertisers are putting pressure on Facebook to address the situation as quickly as possible. While many of the marketers/publishers/advertisers are against ad blockers, Facebook is waging a war against such softwares and definitely not taking it lightly.

Since, to have a good organic reach on Facebook is a massive task in itself, paid promotions and ads going through the turmoil is a nightmare for Facebook marketers. The reducing organic Facebook reach will make marketers think twice about investing in the platform if ads start getting blocked.

What is Adblock Plus? What do they have to say about their side of the war?

Adblock Plus is owned by a German software developer, Eyeo GmbH. They have an active user base of 100 million people. They responded to this turmoil with a statement titles, “Oh well, looks like Facebook just got all anti-user.”
Originally, Facebook was able to suppress ad blocking by taking out the code that differentiated posts from ads. But Adblock Plus blew their cover by finding a loophole in Facebook’s code.
This sort of battle between the open source ad-blocking community and marketers has been going on since ad blocking was invented. Therefore, we are hoping that Facebook will soon drop an H-bomb of coding that will render such ad blocking filters useless.

As a social media agency, we know that a lot of Small Businesses (SMEs/SMBs) depend on Facebook ads for acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Let’s hope they don’t become victims of this digital war and Facebook can find a way around serving quality ads to right users in limited quantities.

Here is how the twitter-verse reacted to this news:

 

@AdblockPlus why not try to see past the differences, work together to give the customers the choice they deserve. this can go on forever.

— Joey (@theRealJoeydood) August 19, 2016

@theRealJoeydood We would prefer to do that. The best option is the one where the user wins and we hope that this is how this will all end. — Adblock Plus (@AdblockPlus) August 19, 2016

@verge Facebook has no Adblock restrictions. They do not restrict Adblock users in any way.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 13, 2016

Damn Facebook trying to nullify AdBlock. — Morgan Anderson (@MachineManiaIII) August 13, 2016

Also read: 4 Obsolete SEO techniques you must avoid in 2016

WeBeeSocial is a full service creative digital marketing agency in New Delhi India. Our In-house Social Media team can help you design the best ads and social media campaigns. Feel free to connect with us to inquire more about our services here.