Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

When I perform a google search for something with no adblocker on, 'sponsored results' show up -- google ads, on google's website. Adblockers hide these. How is this different from fb or amazon aads?



The majority of users are using FB on mobile and the FB app is one of the most popular. Ad Blockers that most people are using on mobile - either via the built in content blocking framework on iOS or by using another browser on Android, don’t work on FB.

FB uses “native ads” and “boosted content” that are indistinguishable from regular posts.


Even on desktop FB's ads are unblocked (or were when I used to have a FB account). They use a significant amount of obfuscation to make it impossible to use typical adblock techniques (url filter, css selectors, simple heuristics) without breaking the rest of the site. So far as I can tell most of the filter maintainers leave Facebook's native ads alone.


I read a while back about a research project to implement adblocking with computer vision. Wonder if that might be able to do it...




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: