Facebook fights back in ad blocker battle

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 that 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 irrelevant ads.

Facebook yesterday began presenting users with new options at the top of their news feed, showing them what Facebook thinks they like 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,” Mr Bosworth 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 because of its natural design, which tightly integrates content and advertising. Facebook generates 87 per cent of its revenue on mobile but is now making changes to ensure its desktop ads cannot be disrupted either.

The social network joins media companies that 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 200 million people now use some form of ad blocking on their laptop or desktop, and so do 420 million of the world’s 1.8 billion smartphone users.

Facebook is the second-largest digital advertising platform by revenue after Google. E-Marketer, the research firm, predicts it will generate $22.4bn from advertising in 2016, compared with $57.8bn for Google. The social network makes most of its money from selling advertisements in the news feed.

But attempts to defeat ad blockers have themselves been met with criticism. The European Commission says "blockers of ad blockers" used by some publishers could break EU privacy laws because, to detect the ad blocker, they may need to store or access information on the user.

- (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016)