In the past few weeks it seems that every tech and marketing news source you run into was talking about ad blocking on iOS9 and ad fraud related issues. These are the two hottest topics at the moment. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebooks Chief Operating Officer, however, is not really concerned over these two problems that are throwing so many others into a panic.
She was presenting at a gathering of ad and media executives and commented that these two issues are something that Facebook, for the most part, doesn’t have to battle with. The fact that all the users on Facebook are tied to a single user account that is (in theory anyway) supposed to be tied to one real life person. This allows them to combat ad fraud in ways that other ad networks simply can’t compete with.
In addition, since most people who access Facebook on their mobile are doing it through Facebook’s own app, the ad blocking technologies used in most ad blockers don’t work. Facebook makes the ads look and function just like normal posts, so the ad blockers don’t have the ability to distinguish between them and real posts (for the most part).
These two things combined are making Facebook more and more attractive to advertisers every day. In fact, according to recent reports, Facebook has added about 500,000 new advertisers to their lineup in just the last six months. That brings their total number of companies using them to advertise to about 2.5 million.
Whether you like Facebook ads or not, there is no arguing with the fact that they bring some significant benefits that other ad networks simply can’t compete with.
