Ad blockers are the primary problem of web publishers. Online platforms and advertisers hate it because it hurt a lot. But users want faster and ads free experience. This is the reason ads blocker exist.
There have been few ways to beat ads blockers. Facebook could do that and even few ads network had the ability to show ads even if ads blocker is installed. Now, it seems these companies have lost their war against ads blocker.
The new ad blocker development by researchers from Princeton and Stanford University is not an ordinary ad blocker that looks at the code to block advertisement. This ad blocker looks at the content in the same humans and finds out if the content is advertisement or part of the content of the page.
This ad blocker is called Perceptual Ad Blocker and Chrome users can already try it. The extension is available in Chrome web store.
Traditional ads blocker just block page requests if it contacts few specific words and scripts by analyzing the code flow. Perceptual Ad Blocker looks at various things including words like Perceptual Ad Blocker, icon graphics, box sizes and more to detect the advertisement. This works best on Facebook where the company tried to Perceptual Ad Blocker by making ads look more like regular posts.
The good thing about this extension is that it does not remove the ad but covers it with works like “This is an ad.” In this way, the platform still earns the ad revenue and users can avoid wasting their time on a sponsored piece of content. You will have an option to remove that overlay to look at advertisement if you are interested.
I tested this extension and found that it works excellent on Facebook and detects every single piece of advertisement. While it also claims to work on Adchoices Advertisements, I couldn’t see it working properly on Google Ads. I could still see ads other than Facebook ads on all the websites I visited. See the snapshot below.
Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and his colleagues started working on this project last summer when Facebook announced changes to its sponsored stories system to make it look like regular posts.Adblock Plus and other mainstream ad blockers have been ineffective on Facebook since then.
The primary reason for working on this project was to give users a way to detect and ignore ads without completely blocking the ads. If you want to read how this extension actually works, you can read here more.
Using Ads blocker is the choice of an Internet user. But they must consider disabling it on the genuine website they love to visit daily. The advertisement is the primary source of earnings and by blocking ads, they are making it hard for their favorite websites to live on the Internet.
What is your take on ad blockers? Share your views in comments.
