
Facebook introduces 15-second video ads that auto-play without sound - tweakz
http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/03/13/facebook-introduces-15-second-premium-video-ads-auto-play-without-sound-stop-scroll-past/
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ACow_Adonis
"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
|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.

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

You could turn that argument on the head. When you're blocking ads, you're
preventing advertisers from wasting money on you, as you wouldn't have bought
anything anyways (for me, annoying online advertising actually lowers the
perception of the brand). So, you're doing advertisers a favour by blocking
the ads.

~~~
nemothekid
The counter to that argument is that an advertiser may not care that you will
click the ad, they just want you to be exposed to the product.

Coke has done this for years and many claim this is their key to their
globally recognizable brand.

~~~
billmalarky
Funny that we both mentioned coke... that's the power of advertising.

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sytelus
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
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).

~~~
zippergz
Did you find your Facebook ads profitable? We've experimented with them a lot,
and have never been able to get a reasonable return on them. However, our goal
has been driving actual sales of a product, not just getting Likes (as many
ads seem to be doing).

~~~
jonathanjaeger
@zippergz: I do ads at a performance based marketing company. For some clients
Facebook is great at driving tons of volume with good performance. I've also
seen clients who pay a bunch for user-signups and it doesn't back out to sales
for their particular product. Buying likes is something people do more for
brand awareness (not so different than say McDonalds buying a TV commercial
but can't measure the exact ROI).

I think the difference often comes down to how well you set up your campaign.
There is often a razor thin line between profitability and losing money in a
performance-based campaign you're tying directly to sales.

If you'd like to ping me at jonathan@hypedsound.com or let me know through
here what your product is, I might be able to guess at whether it seems
feasible.

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matthuggins
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.

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migrantgeek
Facebook is slowly becoming more like Myspace when it lost the lead.

~~~
camus2
Except they have the money the buy any latest hyped app.

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joelrunyon
So this means mobile users get to pay the data costs for ad bandwidth?

~~~
talklittle
_On mobile devices, all videos that begin playing as they appear on the screen
will have been downloaded in advance when the device was connected to WiFi —
meaning this content will not consume data plans, even if you’re not connected
to WiFi at the time of playback_

[https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Testing-a-New-Way-
for...](https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Testing-a-New-Way-for-
Marketers-to-Tell-Stories-in-News-Feed)

~~~
dchuk
Which can royally screw people who are tethering via Wifi to a mobile device
or mobile hotspot.

~~~
MichaelGG
Android, anyways, has a way to mark a WiFi AP as mobile so apps can avoid
this.

~~~
sp332
Oh, cool! Instructions [http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-
points-hot...](http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-points-
hotspots-your-android-device)

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jjgreen
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.

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ilolu
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.

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mgrpowers
Just uninstalled FB from my phone to make space for 7.1. I think I'll just
keep it off.

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beedogs
In related news, I've introduced FB Purity, NoScript, ABP, and Ghostery to
Facebook.

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spiritplumber
Facebook introduces me blocking its crap.

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hn_suxballs
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
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

~~~
hn_suxballs
There there, we don't mind, and all had excused your emotional development
issues. Nurse will be around soon to help out.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Watch out for the hellban son.

