Ad blocking firm Eyeo sees no end in sight to its ongoing tussle with Facebook. The two companies have been fighting to control what Facebook users see in their browsers for a week.
Eyeo’s Ben Williams
On Aug. 9, Facebook began deliberately circumventing third party software that block ads on its web site. However, supporters of Eyeo’s ad blocking software Adblock Plus responded by introducing a new filter that once again blocked Facebook ads.
The two sides have taken turns countering each others’ technical measures ever since. On Friday, when Marketing spoke with Ben Williams, a spokesperson for Eyeo, Facebook had the upper hand.
“That’s where we’re currently at, and we’re looking at what can be done right now,” he said.
Eyeo is not itself creating new filters to block Facebook’s ads. Instead, volunteers add the filters to Easylist, a publicly-maintained list of anti-ad filters that Eyeo’s software uses to block promotional content. Easylist is used by other ad blockers, but Eyeo, whose software is used by 51% of ad block users, has been the most vocal about Facebook’s policy.
Facebook sent Marketing a boilerplate response to questions about the battle, voicing its “disappointment that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook, as these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages”.
Eyeo had been unable to reproduce Facebook’s claims of blocking non-ad content, according to Williams, who said that Facebook has removed most of the code-based tags that flag a given piece of content as an ad. However, Williams said Adblock Plus may block sponsored content shared on someone’s timeline by a friend.
The ad blocking battle is slowly becoming less financially important for Facebook as it focuses more its growing mobile app user base – which is immune to ad blockers – rather than those who log in via web browsers.
As of Q2 2016, the $5.2 billion in Facebook revenues from mobile advertising made up 84% of the social network’s total ad revenue. Mobile ad revenue grew at 81% year-on-year, it said.
Nevertheless, Eyeo (which also offers an ad blocking browser for mobile phones) is determined to keep battling Facebook in the browser. “It will constantly be a back and forth,” Williams said. “Bad things would happen if they remove every bit of identification behind the ads.”
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Tina Star, senior account manager for creative agency 6S Marketing, uses Facebook extensively as an advertising platform. She had no sympathy for ad blocking firms but said the onus was on agencies to be smarter and less intrusive with their advertising.
“Rather than having a back and forth battle with ad blocking technologies, we should aim to better the user’s experience online through relevant and engaging ad content,” she said.
Adblock Plus charges large organizations to have their ads whitelisted, provided they adhere to the firm’s acceptable advertising policy. It plans to create a committee to draft an independent acceptable advertising policy by the end of this year.
This left IAB Canada head Sonia Carreno unimpressed. “The publishers are already doing this with IAB around the world,” she said, referring to the IAB’s LEAN program.
