The social networking site Facebook has broken the news that they will be putting adverts in the home news feeds of its users. These adverts will be quite surreptitious, as other than the two little words ‘featured content’ at the bottom of the post, they will look identical to regular posts on the feed.
So in addition to finding out what Alistair A and Becky B have been up to, users will get unsolicited adverts promoting products. It seems likely that people will unwittingly click on these adverts, not realizing what they are.
It seems highly likely that advertisers will be keen to buy up these slots to promote their goods and services, so it should be very lucrative for Facebook and the associated shareholders.
In order to ease the concerns of those outraged about privacy issues and general intrusion by the site, Facebook has said that only those adverts for products or services which one’s friend has already ‘liked’. In addition, only one ‘featured content’ post will be allowed per day, and there will not be any on the mobile version of the site.
It is not the first time that Facebook have had adverts in the news feed, as they did the same from 2006 to 2009, calling them ‘sponsored content’, but halted the action, possibly in response to criticism. However they have decided to bring the adverts back, but are changing the name.
The reason that Facebook give for calling the new adverts ‘featured content’ rather than the more transparent ‘sponsored’ was because they want people to see that they have chosen the content they are connected to. This may be inadvertent, but Facebook consider it good enough.
With pressure mounting from their rivals at Google, especially the social network Google+, Facebook need to be careful not to abuse its users. Having agreed to controls forced upon them by the Federal Trade Commission in the USA in response to issues regarding privacy, Facebook may need to spend more time focusing on the user experience. Otherwise they could again face charges of being ‘deceptive and unfair’ to their users.
It is not the only change to come to Facebook’s 800 million users. They have also introduced a Timeline feature that shows the history of the user’s activities on Facebook, as well as a constantly-updating ticker. Shortly after the latest update, a poll discovered that an overwhelming 86% of users that responded hate the update. Extrapolated, that figure means that almost 700 million people think Facebook should return to the old way.
If Facebook is to remain supreme in the social networking wars, then they may need to spend more time looking after their users rather than their advertisers. 91% of teenagers, arguably their biggest target audience, said that Facebook was worse after the site was updated. Not a good sign for one of the largest and biggest sites on the internet, but it is unlikely to be a fatal one.
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