Fearful of Reader Reaction, Facebook Delays Video Ads

AlistairCharlton writes "Facebook is continuing with plans to launch news feed video adverts, but has faced setbacks with CEO Mark Zuckerberg twice delaying the project amid fears of tainting the user experience. Reports claim Facebook will soon add 15-second video adverts to users' news feeds in a bid to lure big spenders away from traditional television ads and onto the social network." For some reason, video ads bother me little on sites like YouTube (where the content is visual, sound isn't a big surprise, and the ads are usually quickly interruptable), but otherwise they make me cringe and wish for a nuclear-enabled ad blocker.

Comments

If it's free, YOU are the product

[RogueWarrior65]

FB doesn't make a dime off of people posting what they had for breakfast. They make money off of ads.
For my own part, it's allowed me to stay in touch with people from the various chapters of my life. That's what it is to most people. But that doesn't make FB any money.
FB's iOS app is pretty much useless because of the intrusive ads. They usually fill up the entire screen and I believe some of the postings from my friends are not being displayed in favor of ads in the same way that the postings from friends you rarely interact with aren't displayed in favor of the ones you interact with daily.
FB must know that more intrusive ads will piss people off. But they still need to make money. Rock? Meet hard place.

Re:Haha, what?

[HaZardman27]

I can't wait for Facebook to be dethroned

Then take the first step and start using something else.

What people feel about the ads is not relevant

[The MAZZTer]

As long as they keep using Facebook it doesn't matter how much they hate the ads or how loudly they complain.

Re:What people feel about the ads is not relevant

[crashcy]

I disagree. The more intrusive your advertising is, the more people are likely to search for solutions. This pushes more and more of your users to adopt script and ad blockers (really, abp is so simple to install and use I'm amazed anyone doesn't at least use it). I read a study recently, unfortunately I don't have the source, that suggested 10% of internet users are now running ad blockers. Facebook has to try to estimate how many more people will start blocking all ads, and if the lost value of an increased portion of their users not seeing any ads at all is more or less than the increased revenue from inflicting more intrusive ads on those remaining unblocked.

Re:People will fucking hate those ads

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Zuckerberg isn't a fucking idiot

Ah, but he's a not-fucking-idiot with a brood of hungry shareholders (more than a few still deep in the hole from the IPO) to appease. Many a destructive action has appeared proximately logical under those conditions...

ISP Cap

[AnalogDiehard]

My ISP has a cap on download. Video ads eat up bandwidth and nudges my usage towards that monthly cap. The day that FB launches video ads, I will no longer patronize FB because it is costing ME $$$, not to mention intruding my limited personal time on the internet.

Are all web marketing executives lobotomized?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

And does it happen before or after they're hired?

Did it ever occur to any of these web advertising geniuses that we don't *all* have broadband all the time and that their cheery little video missives slow down the browser to the point where you turn it off?

And if we do have broadband, but we're getting it through a hotspot where we're charged through the nose for going over 2 Gigabyes a month, that just maybe we're going to start avoiding these expensive leech ad pages like the plague?

Seriously, if your advertising starts costing me money or time, you're shit out of luck. I not only won't buy from you, I'll never see your ad in the first place.

Zuckerberg is rightfully wary

[Opportunist]

Ads are always annoying to the person subjected to them. But there are varying degrees of annoying. A banner is annoying if it's drawing your attention by flashing, but you shrug it off. A popup is annoying and you have to close it. And various others require you to click somewhere to close them or get rid of them, but they're just annoying.

It stops being annoying and it starts making people really angry if they have to sit and wait. And that's basically what you have to do when using video ads. You have to sit there and wait. Because if you COULD close it easily, it would fail to deliver its message. Think about it: Consider you only get to see 2-3 Seconds of a TV ad. Would you even know what product is being hawked?

So to make video ads efficient, you not only have to annoy the person seeing it, you have to BORE him. And bored people generally start to think. No, don't come around with "but FB users are too dumb to think", people DO think when they're bored. They are working out a scheme to get rid of their boredom. If they have to click to close something, you're doing something and hence it's not as annoying as sitting there and just waiting.

And every user can open a new window, open the search engine of his choice and enter "how the FUCK do I get rid of those damn ads on facebook".

And from this moment on, he does not only block the video ads, he is blocking ALL ads, hence not only not increasing FBs ad revenue but actually DEcreasing it.

And that's what Zuckerberg is afraid of.