The ongoing battle between ad technology companies, the publishers and ad blocking software companies seeking to finance their activities using advertising appears to have recently taken a different twist.
This situation is mainly owed to Eyeo’s introduction of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven ad detector that is designed to thwart technologies that are designed to force adverts onto clients with installed ad blockers.
The company behind the creation of Adblock Plus said recently that applauded its announcement of it AI-based technology called Sentinel as a new era for advert blocking.
Traditionally, an ad-blocker works mainly through blacklisting certain website elements that unwanted and considered as adverts within the code.
In fact, the general idea of blocking ought to be in a position to keep adverts at bay as well as viruses and malware. Nevertheless, such a system has to be regularly updated in a bid to make sure that it works effectively.
Eyeo’s new ad detector, Sentinel, is only a beta project that is created on neural net technology.
The Adblock Plus maker is currently requesting consumers to submit photos of their Facebook feeds in an attempt to train the software to recognize natively-served advertisements that would normally prevent typical advert blocking software.
Unlike the traditional ad blocking method, the new beta-stage program utilizes artificial intelligence technology to recognize ads without the need for using blocking lists in a bid to determine what an advertisement entails.
Through training the algorithm technology to identify ads, Eyeo is spearheading a new method in which advertisement blocking is extra effective, particularly for all the parties involved while developing a system that is well-advanced to trace the technology that is capable of breaking through the existing ad blockers.
Eyeo hopes that with time, Sentinel would expand exponentially beyond Facebook adverts with the possibility of ultimately replacing advertisement blocking programs that depend on block lists in a bid to filter undesired content.
According to the press release announcing Eyeo’s new ad blocking technology, Sentinel appears to be a response to malicious advertising techniques that have recently seen ads constantly re-appear on the pages of users despite attempts to block them using ad blockers.
Instead, Sentinel utilizes an object detection artificial intelligence technique that allows identification without the need for the back-end code.
Eyeo is a German-based firm that was created in 2011 by Wladimir Palant and Till Faida. Since then, the company has grown to become an open source software provider. The company’s Adblock Plus is considered the most commonly used extension around the world.
Even so, this blocker is a free browser add-on, which boasts more than a billion downloads worldwide.
According to Faida, Facebook and other platforms are becoming smarter at disguising their adverts from advert blockers through the use of circumvention methods to display adverts.
He emphasized that Eyeon has always been in a position to create workarounds to such tactics. However, the battle is not yet to be won in the near future.
Although it is still in its early stages, Sentinel provides the structure of a long-term solution to the emergence of anti-user circumventionists. Additionally, the technology could also affect the ad detection and viewability within the advertisement industry.
