Following the news that Facebook will be blocking ad blockers on desktop, the advertising industry exploded with commentary on the positive impact this development will have among publishers, advertisers, and every person and platform offering content to the masses through social media.
The social media behemoth confirms that it is knocking out all detected ad blockers in a move that even circumvents ad blocking software installed on the desktop computers of Facebook users.
In breaking the news, Mike Isaac of The New York Times calls Facebook’s decision a “major step in the controversial fight against ad blocking that has publishers, advertisers and consumers on edge.”
To delve deeper into the impact of Facebook’s decision, MAW caught up with Mark Bauman, CEO of ReviveAds, for an exclusive chat on Facebook’s decision.
An expert on ad blocking technologies and policies, Bauman is now at the helm of a company that offers an ad block prevention tool.
Bauman’s take?
“Most social networks are no different than other digital publishers — they all rely on ad revenues,” he tells MAW. “And reality is that ad blockers jeopardize ad revenues. Based on our calculation, publishers on average are losing 23% to 28% due to ad blocking. For one of our clients for which we circumvent ad blockers this means about $500,000 a month; but for Facebook, that means about $50 million per month in lost revenue that they can revive.”
“Based on how much more receptive publishers are to our anti ad blocking solution today, compared to when we started two years ago,” Bauman concludes, “I believe the industry is at an inflection point. Publishers realize the threat ad blockers pose and are ready to take action; they are just concerned about how consumers will react if they make viewing ads mandatory – and they can’t afford to lose viewers. The announcement from Facebook, which has over 1.7B active monthly users, will help to create awareness of the dangers of ad blocking. It will help consumers realize that online advertisements – if done responsibly – are an integral component to the free media landscape.”
Although Facebook isn’t drawing much attention to its decision, Andrew Bosworth, vice president for Facebook’s ads and business platform, is quoted by the NYT admitting that disruptive ads “are an industry problem,” but that ad blockers “are a really bad solution to that.”