I do not think that ad blockers can win this cat and mouse game. Ads don't annoy a large-enough percentage of humans. And the ad industry is the lifeblood of several other business communities, each of which is many times the size of the ad blocking industry.
I had lunch with one well respected publishing CEO last week, who told me that his single largest advertiser was Smuckers. The peanut butter maker. Smuckers is a real business, supporting real people, making real stuff. They know their business better than anyone else. And every day of every month of every quarter, they seem to decide that they need advertising.
Once you start thinking about it that way, you start to understand why advertising is one of the oldest industries in the world.
And he/she/it seems happy also to allow arbitrary code to run on his/her/its machines.
I may even accept getting occasionally distracted by benign ads (just plain text or images or even videos as on newspapers/TV) but I cannot and will not accept advertisers or their agents running their arbitrary code on my machines at all.
If you took a look at the inbox of an ordinary consumer, you'd see lots of desired ads – in my case, a weekly email from a high end audio shop I like.
You may assiduously unsubscribe from all unsolicited email, but most do not. For most people, what is in Gmail's spam folder is genuine junk – emails from Nigerian princes, emails in cyrillic, etc.
> Ads don't annoy a large-enough percentage of humans
Yes they do. It's just that most people don't know ad-blockers exist. I installed ublock on one of my (elderly) relative, she then recommended it to her friends. She just can't surf without it turned on now, it changed her surfing experience, for the better.
Nobody will "win", as in, nobody will exterminate the other. Ad blockers won't eliminate the advertising industry, of course -- but the industry will not be able of getting rid of ad blockers or render them ineffective.
They will need to learn to coexist. This FB initiative is futile.
I had lunch with one well respected publishing CEO last week, who told me that his single largest advertiser was Smuckers. The peanut butter maker. Smuckers is a real business, supporting real people, making real stuff. They know their business better than anyone else. And every day of every month of every quarter, they seem to decide that they need advertising.
Once you start thinking about it that way, you start to understand why advertising is one of the oldest industries in the world.