[nl]

And then, back in reality, FB is minting money.

Advertising has been a huge business for the last 100 years (or more) and it is all going to move online.

The more people deploy adblockers, the more FB makes: (statistically) everyone on mobile access it (and other FB-owned brands) via the app, so they get the revenue of the money that would go to the open web.

[drusepth]

I don't use adblockers so I'm not 100% sure how they work, but don't mobile ones work at some system level to prevent other apps (e.g. Chrome) from showing ads? Why wouldn't they also target other popular apps with ads like Facebook?

[monorailz]

The kind of mobile ad blockers that work on the system level require root permissions afaiaa. Meanwhile, uBlock Origin is available on Firefox for Android, but being a Firefox extension, does not have the possibility of blocking traffic in other apps.

The amount of people who have rooted Android devices are probably far lower than the likely-also-low number of people using in-browser ad blockers on Android. For iOS devices, the number of people with jailbroken devices I would guess to be lower in relative percentage than on Android. I don't know if even just in-browser adblocking is possible on iOS at all without jailbreaking.

Anyway, point is, while ad blocking might be relatively wide-spread on the desktop among all people (why else would media bother to spend valuable developer time implementing ad blocker blockers?), in-app ad blocking probably is much less common and that's what fb benefits from.

[michaelbuckbee]

There are a variety of adblocking technologies. The spectrum goes from the simplest which just block domains, to ones which block substrings of URLs and DOM elements to ones actively stopping "please stop adblocking" notices.

In general AdBlocking works very well on the open internet with the browser of your choice. However, they're basically non-functional for things happening in-app over HTTPS connections. So, with the majority of FB mobile traffic happening over the dedicated FB app - they are largely immune to blocking AND have a much better set of demographic targeting features.

[nl]

No, they are all implemented as browser addons.