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On Aug. 9 Facebook announced it had found a way around Adblock’s technology, allowing it to show ads to users who have Adblock’s software installed on their devices. “Rather than paying ad blocking companies to unblock the ads we show — as some of these companies have invited us to do in the past — we’re putting control in people’s hands with our updated ad preferences and our other advertising controls,” Andrew Bosworth, VP of ads and business platforms for Facebook, wrote in a blog post.
That didn’t last long: by Aug. 11, Adblock’s community of users had found a way around Facebook’s anti-ad blocking efforts, with a new Adblock Plus filter again blocking ads on Facebook.
“Facebook might ‘re-circumvent’ at any time,” Ben Williams, spokesman and operations manager for Adblock, wrote in an Aug. 11 blog post. “This sort of back-and-forth battle between the open source ad-blocking community and circumventers has been going on since ad blocking was invented; so it’s very possible that Facebook will write some code that will render the filter useless — at any time.”
He was right: by Friday midday, Facebook and the Adblock open-source community had thwarted each other’s efforts twice each. “Should Facebook circumvent again, I’m sure another solution will arise from that open source community,” Williams wrote Aug. 12. “And so on. What is the solution? We invite publishers and web sites to work with Adblock Plus and our whitelisting process, rather than circumventing consumers’ expressed concerns.”
That whitelisting process — Adblock’s Acceptable Ad program, which allows ads to be seen even with ad-blocking software, if they meet certain requirements — requires larger online companies to pay Adblock a fee.
Facebook, Adblock Plus Spar Over Ad Blocking | Broadcasting & Cable
That didn’t last long: by Aug. 11, Adblock’s community of users had found a way around Facebook’s anti-ad blocking efforts, with a new Adblock Plus filter again blocking ads on Facebook.
“Facebook might ‘re-circumvent’ at any time,” Ben Williams, spokesman and operations manager for Adblock, wrote in an Aug. 11 blog post. “This sort of back-and-forth battle between the open source ad-blocking community and circumventers has been going on since ad blocking was invented; so it’s very possible that Facebook will write some code that will render the filter useless — at any time.”
He was right: by Friday midday, Facebook and the Adblock open-source community had thwarted each other’s efforts twice each. “Should Facebook circumvent again, I’m sure another solution will arise from that open source community,” Williams wrote Aug. 12. “And so on. What is the solution? We invite publishers and web sites to work with Adblock Plus and our whitelisting process, rather than circumventing consumers’ expressed concerns.”
That whitelisting process — Adblock’s Acceptable Ad program, which allows ads to be seen even with ad-blocking software, if they meet certain requirements — requires larger online companies to pay Adblock a fee.
Facebook, Adblock Plus Spar Over Ad Blocking | Broadcasting & Cable