6 ms·

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

46 points by tweakz 13y ago

jjgreen 13y ago
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.
matthuggins 13y ago
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.
ilolu 13y ago
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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
joelrunyon 13y ago
So this means mobile users get to pay the data costs for ad bandwidth?
- talklittle 13y ago
  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-Marketers-to-Tell-Stories-in-News-Feed https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Testing-a-New-Way-for...
  - spike021 13y ago
    I wonder if this is how the functionality works in Instagram. I was pretty disappointed last week when a video auto-played while I was using my data (200mb per month plan). If not, then it'd be nice if they could try to stay consistent across platforms.
  - deletes 13y ago
    Wow just wow, so adds are silently infecting your device only to be produced at the right( read: worst ) moment.
  - dchuk 13y ago
    Which can royally screw people who are tethering via Wifi to a mobile device or mobile hotspot.
    - kevincrane 13y ago
      Yeah, but those are a pretty small minority. A lot of apps have the courtesy check of "don't download songs (photos/videos, whatever) until you're on WiFI". At some point an app has to assume it's safe to download assets, and when you're on WiFi is a pretty safe assumption.
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      Android, anyways, has a way to mark a WiFi AP as mobile so apps can avoid this.
      - sp332 13y ago
        Oh, cool! Instructions http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-points-hotspots-your-android-device http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-points-hot...
  - comex 13y ago
    Off topic, but this idea that bandwidth has to be carefully thought about and rationed, and resulting avoidance of innovation that uses bandwidth - not that ads are that innovative, but there are many similar situations - is why unlimited bandwidth really has significant benefits, even if the argument that metered bandwidth encourages providers to increase capacity is probably sound.
hn_suxballs 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    There there, we don't mind, and all had excused your emotional development issues. Nurse will be around soon to help out.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Watch out for the hellban son.
  - jggkffkfjfjfjfj 13y ago
    but to be fair, he had to dodge punches to the face and was entitled to a philosophy. Not sure posting lame comments like yours has the same entitlement
  - sp332 13y ago
    Yes, the more mature of us would close the browser in only one second. Or thinking coolly and rationally, block Facebook traffic on our home networks. Edit: I accept the downvotes for pointless snark, but really, what would maturity look like in this case? Closing the tab with less swearing?
migrantgeek 13y ago
Facebook is slowly becoming more like Myspace when it lost the lead.
- camus2 13y ago
  Except they have the money the buy any latest hyped app.
ACow_Adonis 13y ago
"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 13y ago
  |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 13y ago
    > 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.
sytelus 13y ago
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.
- devcpp 13y ago
  Well, it is a publicly-traded company now. When a shareholder sees the opportunity to make a dime, he'll seize it.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      @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.
spiritplumber 13y ago
Facebook introduces me blocking its crap.
mgrpowers 13y ago
Just uninstalled FB from my phone to make space for 7.1. I think I'll just keep it off.
beedogs 13y ago
In related news, I've introduced FB Purity, NoScript, ABP, and Ghostery to Facebook.

46 points by tweakz 13y ago

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.

matthuggins 13y ago

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.

ilolu 13y ago

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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

joelrunyon 13y ago

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

talklittle 13y ago
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-Marketers-to-Tell-Stories-in-News-Feed https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Testing-a-New-Way-for...
- spike021 13y ago
  I wonder if this is how the functionality works in Instagram. I was pretty disappointed last week when a video auto-played while I was using my data (200mb per month plan). If not, then it'd be nice if they could try to stay consistent across platforms.
- deletes 13y ago
  Wow just wow, so adds are silently infecting your device only to be produced at the right( read: worst ) moment.
- dchuk 13y ago
  Which can royally screw people who are tethering via Wifi to a mobile device or mobile hotspot.
  - kevincrane 13y ago
    Yeah, but those are a pretty small minority. A lot of apps have the courtesy check of "don't download songs (photos/videos, whatever) until you're on WiFI". At some point an app has to assume it's safe to download assets, and when you're on WiFi is a pretty safe assumption.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    Android, anyways, has a way to mark a WiFi AP as mobile so apps can avoid this.
    - sp332 13y ago
      Oh, cool! Instructions http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-points-hotspots-your-android-device http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-points-hot...
- comex 13y ago
  Off topic, but this idea that bandwidth has to be carefully thought about and rationed, and resulting avoidance of innovation that uses bandwidth - not that ads are that innovative, but there are many similar situations - is why unlimited bandwidth really has significant benefits, even if the argument that metered bandwidth encourages providers to increase capacity is probably sound.

hn_suxballs 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  There there, we don't mind, and all had excused your emotional development issues. Nurse will be around soon to help out.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Watch out for the hellban son.
- jggkffkfjfjfjfj 13y ago
  but to be fair, he had to dodge punches to the face and was entitled to a philosophy. Not sure posting lame comments like yours has the same entitlement
- sp332 13y ago
  Yes, the more mature of us would close the browser in only one second. Or thinking coolly and rationally, block Facebook traffic on our home networks. Edit: I accept the downvotes for pointless snark, but really, what would maturity look like in this case? Closing the tab with less swearing?

migrantgeek 13y ago

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

camus2 13y ago
Except they have the money the buy any latest hyped app.

ACow_Adonis 13y ago

"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 13y ago
|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 13y ago
  > 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.

sytelus 13y ago

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.

devcpp 13y ago
Well, it is a publicly-traded company now. When a shareholder sees the opportunity to make a dime, he'll seize it.
jonathanjaeger 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    @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.

spiritplumber 13y ago

Facebook introduces me blocking its crap.

mgrpowers 13y ago

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

beedogs 13y ago

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