Today on a facebook event invite page, I saw complaints about “creepy flat tummy ads” on the invite page. Another peep complained about a “holistic wellness” ad. On the same page, I saw four (yes 4) ads: 1) A business opportunity called “Own Your Own ATM”, 2) an ad offering college students as “IT interns”, 3) “Soothing music selected by Eckhart Tolle” and ummm, this is embarrassing: 4) “60% off a Brazilian Wax”. Well you now know what gender I am.
And that’s the point, Facebook ads are targeted to your profile, your interests, the links you post, the stuff you like. If you haven’t already, take a look at the Facebook ad interface, you can customize it quite a bit, age ranges, geography etc. Facebook is betting that access to these sorts of demographics will make it the advertiser of choice. However the jury is still out. Some people report great success with Facebook ads, some don’t. It’s very niche dependent.
And yes, you can remove / block Facebook ads. There are a number of solutions available as the blocking code has to be installed into your browser. So it depends on what browser you use.
Here are a few to check out:
- Firefox: Ad block plus, also check out this post on Greasemonkey
- Chrome: Chrome extension
Note with the current major Facebook update rolling out, these might not work with the “new facebook”. You might need to wait until the authors catch up.
Let me know how it works out. I haven’t installed any of them yet.
