The ad and spam blocking service, Adblock Plus has expanded its filtering capabilities on the Facebook platform. From now on it will be possible to block not only strictly speaking advertising, advertisements and sponsored publications, but also all those information, suggestions or reminders that the Israel Mobile Database platform serves its users based on their profile data.
The response has been considerable. In the first three days, 20,000 people downloaded the new service. This success demonstrates the desire of users to be able to personalize their Facebook experience as much as possible and filter out certain elements that they find annoying. For the creator and CEO of Adblock Plus, Til Faida, this implies that “what users really want is to have total control of their online experience.”
Not only advertisements for brands and companies appear in the Facebook sidebar, but also suggestions for pages, contacts, games that your contacts play, polls to vote for movies, music services or event reminders. They are not advertising, but they can be just as overwhelming and annoying for some users. The new version of the Adblock Plus browser extension has picked up the glove and now also allows blocking of these types of distractions, although it is not currently available in the mobile version.
“Help your friends surf the web without annoying ads.” So clear. This is the message from Adblock Plus to encourage its users to share the platform with their Facebook friends: “Help your friends navigate without annoying ads.” The service has had 200 million downloads since its launch and works based on filter lists that the user can configure to their liking to decide if they want navigation without banners, pop-ups or video ads, both on the Web and on Facebook and Youtube.
When Zuckerberg’s company decided to include advertising on its platform in order to monetize its great success and popularity, many took their heads and predicted the end of the social network. Instead, time passes, many users have become accustomed to seeing ads around their profile and brands are seeing results: in the retail sector, the ROI of Facebook ads is around 150% (sPMD). In fact, the platform continues to experiment with new ways to be more attractive to advertisers such as automatic video playback in the news feed. At the moment it is not available for brands, precisely because the company first has to calibrate the degree of intrusion it entails and the acceptance that it may or may not have among its users.
Adblock Plus emerged precisely in the brother Cell Phone List heat of the proliferation of advertising formulas that were excessively burdensome for a user who had finally found a medium in which he was not prey to advertising. The service does not condemn all advertisers, it is the user who sets up his own block lists and chooses what type of advertising he allows to be shown. There is also a list of Acceptable Ads for brands that meet certain good practice requirements.
