It's tedious but it is possible to click on the context menu next to an ad, then click "why am I seeing this ad", and then click "never show ads from this source again".
Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...
My boss shared a story about his time at Facebook. He was working on ads during 2012 election, and Facebook had a problem. It was just a couple of weeks before the election and the Romney campaign had money to burn. They were winning auctions on facebook left and right. The problem was that too many people had clicked the "never show ads from this source again" button on the ads. Guess what, he was tasked with turning the button off for Romney ads, now facebook could show as many political ads as the campaign could buy.
> It's tedious but it is possible to click on the context menu next to an ad, then click "why am I seeing this ad", and then click "never show ads from this source again".
The ad-buyers funnel their ad buys through agencies and separate accounts.
Facebook sponsored posts and Twitch ads are the only ones that get away with it that I've came across - and noticed at least. When you inspect FB sponsored posts' HTML they're very obscured indeed, there's sure no instance of "Sponsored" anywhere in the page's HTML. I haven't really tried but there doesn't seem to be any well rated "FB ad blocker" extension either, whereas you can block Twitch ads easily with a number of extensions. OTOH I've never understood how it can be so rare, even Google's cash cows are [killed by UBO](https://imgur.com/a/fKJDKk2) from their own own store. To get away with it on mobile they had to gut all mobile extensions, somehow without losing their kingly market share. Funnily enough, even if FB are pretty much the only ones getting away from basic browser adblockers AFAIK, that segment is barely material for $FB as they get like 94% of their revenue from mobile anyhow (presumably quasi-all from the native apps).
If someone knows why obscuring HTML to force ads isn't more common practice, I'd be curious to know. I get it maybe for small websites that need the organic traffic (I assume Google would hit your SEO if your page structure looks like FB's), but how can it be so hard when it is indeed possible? I could understand if Google more specifically doesn't even try as they may lose adblocking nerds and they could use the data anyway, but I would expect to come across more sites that found solutions or clever ways of serving ads around UBO/ABP, at least make me use the picker. Is it really a colossal job to obscure ads and if it is reachable wouldn't medium-sized websites that find implementations remain unpatched for quite a while (big world out there)? Do you really need to own >$100B/Y business on godly margins or AWS to afford a fighting chance at that arm's race?
> If someone knows why obscuring HTML to force ads isn't more common practice, I'd be curious to know.
Three basic reasons:
1. For websites that aren't as large as Facebook, most advertisers insist on running their own code on the page to do things like count impressions (to make sure the owner of the site can't lie about how many views the ads got). This is easily blockable.
2. It's not profitable for most websites to engage in an arms race with ad blockers. Your web developers' time is almost certainly better spent on trying to grow the userbase, not showing ads to a subset of users who will almost certainly not click on them. (And businesses will often make decisions based on data from third-party trackers that are also blocked by ad blockers, so it's possible the relevant department does not even know those users exist.)
3. There is already a very difficult-to-block form of advertisement available to many websites: sponsored content. Just bake the advertisement directly into the video, or as a paragraph of a long blog post with no distinguishing CSS, or something.
Also as a developer, I feel its my duty to be a good steward towards people that want to block ads or use classes that will block social media icons using classes from those lists and still look appealing. The client likely doesn't know and neither do the majority of users that haven't enabled such features, but respecting the wishes of those that do I think is the right thing to do. It's in the same class as respecting Save-Data: On or or DNT: 1.
F.B. Purity does just that, but the HTML is fairly complicated (if I remember correctly, the relevant words are a jumble of absolutely positioned spans, with a lot of fodder thrown in to throw off blockers). Facebook changed their code about a month ago, and the extension developer has been working on a fix for almost all of that time and still hasn't rolled it out yet.
Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...