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Facebook introduces 15-second video ads that auto-play without sound

46 points| tweakz | 12 years ago |thenextweb.com | reply

43 comments

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[+] ACow_Adonis|12 years ago|reply
"Facebook says it is taking steps to ensure video ads that appear on its site “are as good as other content people see in their News Feeds.”"

My buttocks randomly bouncing up and down the keyboard could produce better content than most of the stuff I saw on my news feed when I was on facebook, so that's not exactly going to be difficult...

More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.

I honestly don't know how people put up with it.

And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default? For these large corporations or institutions, I imagine a significant percentage of bandwidth is wasted on "content" (and i use that word in its loosest possible sense) no one really wants to access...

[+] billmalarky|12 years ago|reply
|More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.

As the CPM (money you receive per thousand views of an ad) of internet ads has plummeted over the years, sites are resorting to larger and more annoying ads because they pay better.

|And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default?

Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

[+] cortesoft|12 years ago|reply
Can you send me some of that random-butt-bouncing text?
[+] sytelus|12 years ago|reply
FB is clearly gasping for every last bit of money lately. Other day I saw nearly every ad on right of my page like it was a porn website. Each ad features scantly naked women with captions like "She wants you now". When you click on those links you land of completely irrelevant websites trying to push some maleware.
[+] jonathanjaeger|12 years ago|reply
I've run a lot of Facebook ads before and I keep very close attention to the ads that are shown on Facebook. In their defense, they have over a million advertisers, they can't catch everything. Many scammy advertisers will be on one day and banned the next, I would hope. Though, it's definitely possible they are more lenient on certain advertisers now that money is even more important.

The more things you 'like' on Facebook, the better the targeting will be. Considering I work in marketing and visit a lot of sites at the office, I'm constantly getting retargeting ads. Less so the scammy dating ones (though it happens).

[+] devcpp|12 years ago|reply
Well, it is a publicly-traded company now. When a shareholder sees the opportunity to make a dime, he'll seize it.
[+] matthuggins|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, I called it as soon as they started auto-playing friends' videos in our news feeds. They were clearly just getting us accustomed to the idea of stopping scrolling so they know we'll see these ads.
[+] migrantgeek|12 years ago|reply
Facebook is slowly becoming more like Myspace when it lost the lead.
[+] camus2|12 years ago|reply
Except they have the money the buy any latest hyped app.
[+] joelrunyon|12 years ago|reply
So this means mobile users get to pay the data costs for ad bandwidth?
[+] jjgreen|12 years ago|reply
Seen on the Register:

Phase 3: Increasingly desperate attempts to monetize the user base. A short but pivotal phase of the social network lifespan that quickly slides into:

Phase 4: The vicious spiral of lame.

[+] ilolu|12 years ago|reply
So how is facebook going to show value to advertisers from this ad format ?. I could scroll beyond the ad and it might even play to completion.
[+] mgrpowers|12 years ago|reply
Just uninstalled FB from my phone to make space for 7.1. I think I'll just keep it off.
[+] beedogs|12 years ago|reply
In related news, I've introduced FB Purity, NoScript, ABP, and Ghostery to Facebook.
[+] hn_suxballs|12 years ago|reply
Hey, that's great, because I can close the tab or even the browser in less than three seconds, and make a noise like "fuck you farcebook"!
[+] melling|12 years ago|reply
I often wonder if the less emotionally developed among us ever ask themselves: "Could I be the one with the problem?"

Sure, it's definitely tough growing up but if we could hack emotional development so we could gain a decade or two of experience, we'd all be a little better off. This quote comes to mind.

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

― Muhammad Ali