Hi, I'm an engineer from Facebook's ads team. I worked on ads for Timeline. The article's unsubstantiated premise is that Facebook releases products solely wit

Hi, I'm an engineer from Facebook's ads team. I worked on ads for Timeline. The article's unsubstantiated premise is that Facebook releases products solely with its bottom line in mind. Based on my experience working on ads for Timeline, I'd say that this is antithetical to our nature. We optimized timeline for user experience (engagement) and released it not because of its impact to our bottom line but DESPITE that. If you aren't convinced, look at the ads on Timeline, and compare to Profile. There were on average four ads per Profile page. Now there's two. People also click away a lot faster on Profile (because there's less content), but people now scroll around and navigate within Timeline. Photos are bigger, we show a lot more content. The resources to support these new products are expensive. If this doesn't illustrate our focus on engagement over our bottom line, color me surprised. Just another point I wanted to clarify: Whenever money changed hands, even for organic content like sponsored stories, they are clearly labeled "Sponsored." If you don't see Sponsored, there was no optimization for revenue, because no money changed hands. Ultimately, I think the author is exploiting a confusion between news feed and timeline. Sure, we will experiment with sponsoring organic content in news feed (max one), but they will be clearly labeled and things you can already see. I just wanted to clarify a few issues that the author is either truly confused about, or is aware of but intentionally exploiting. I hope this helped. If you have any questions I can answer, I'll be happy to clarify.