How to Stop Facebook Ads?

In this article, we’ll be discussing all about Facebook, and how it makes money, ad revenue, and how to stop Facebook ads. 

• Facebook and its ad revenue

Facebook is a social networking website and it allows users to post photos, videos, status updates, reels, Live videos, etc. It is used by people from all over the world to engage with their friends and family. (This is how you can increase your engagement  on Facebook)

 It is used actively used by marketers to promote their brand and grow their business. In fact, you would be surprised to know that digital marketing or influencer marketing is slowly taking over traditional marketing methods.  This is because it is economically feasible and helps to reach out to a much larger audience quite easily. 

Facebook is also increasingly being used by people to be an influencer. This means that people use their Facebook pages as a platform to represent brands and their products. Influencer Marketing is slowly becoming more popular than traditional marketing. 

Facebook is currently the most popularly used social networking website with 2.9 billion monthly active users from all over the world-beating Instagram (currently at 1.2 billion monthly active users) and Twitter (500 million monthly active users). About 400 new people sign up with Facebook every single minute.  Due to such a massive engagement with its audience, it’s absolutely no surprise that facebook’s current market capitalization stands at $545 billion and its current stock price is $203. This is the reason why Facebook holds a very dominant place in the market and has established itself as a financial giant on Wall Street. Users aren’t directly paying any money to Facebook. So, did you ever wonder where is all of this money coming from? 

• How does Facebook make money and why do you receive Facebook ads? 

In 2021, Facebook made $117 billion and almost 98% of its earnings came from ad revenue i.e. by showing ads from advertisers within the Facebook app. The remaining 2% of its earnings came from selling Oculus and portal devices. (In case you aren’t aware Facebook bought Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion). 

Now we’ve mentioned, that Facebook earns most of its income from ad revenue. In simple terms, that means ads are displayed on facebook’s main website or mobile application and marketers pay for these ads on the basis of the number of impressions delivered, and the number of actions like clicks undertaken by users. 

These ads are generally user-targeted which means that Facebook will show you ads based on your searches and your interest. So, for example, if you’ve been looking at shoes online, you’ll start getting shoe ads on Facebook. Also, your activity on the platform i.e. liking any page (get more likes ) or your age, gender, your location play a key role in determining what kind of ads are being shown to you.  This is common with other social media platforms as well. Facebook is also an essential tool for marketers to reach their target group audience easily otherwise they would’ve to spend thousands of dollars doing research and reaching out to the target audience. 

• How to stop Facebook ads? 

Now, that we’ve discussed the reasons why Facebook shows us ads, let’s now move on to the main topic of discussion i.e., how to stop Facebook ads, because let’s address the elephant in the room – Facebook ads can be really irritating and they definitely ruin your scrolling experience. The average Facebook user clicks on about 11 ads/month, which means that the social networking site is successful in its business strategies. 

As mentioned before, Facebook earns its revenue by showing ads to its users, therefore one cannot completely get rid of Facebook ads. But don’t lose all hope as there are definitely some things that can be done to remove Facebook ads. 

Any Facebook user can opt-out of ads based on his/her browsing habits. Following are the steps to do so- 

1. Log in to your Facebook account and click on “settings”.
2. Scroll down in the settings section and click on “ads”. Here you’ll come across various ad preferences. 
3. Under Ad preferences, you’ll find three categories- “Advertisers”, “Ad topics”, and “Ad settings”. 
4. “Advertisers” contains the list of companies that are showing you, their ads. You can choose the option “Hide Ads” to hide these ads. 
5. In “Ad topics” you can choose the option to see fewer ads for a particular topic, for example, politics or fashion. Each of these categories will have the option “Show fewer” next to them. Click on it and Facebook will now show you fewer ads from that category. 
6. “Ad settings” show you ads based on your personal information such as your age, location, relationship status, etc. These settings can be modified to decrease the number of personalized ads. It should be noted that changing the ad settings will only reduce the personalized ads you’re shown but the number of ads will still be the same. To modify these settings, you just have to toggle off each setting. For example, click “Data about your activity from partners” and then toggle it off by moving the button from blue to grey. 

 ▪︎ Another thing you can do to get rid of ads generated by Facebook is downloading ad-blocking programs to clean up your browser page. After installation of an ad-blocking program, it will block the upload of ads that originate from certain advertisement websites. 

These are some of the things that can be done to reduce the ads or at least filter them according to one’s convenience.