Ads in my Facebook news feed!

These sponsored stories, of who likes what, are super annoying. Letting advertises game the feed is a bad idea. Don’t they earn enough with ads already. YouTube and Twitter have also done this, but it’s specifically annoying on Facebook, just because my feed is supposed to be about what people in my friend list are actually doing, rather than what is being promoted by companies.

It’s okay if YouTube does it, as YouTube is not intrinsically a social product. It’s also cool if Twitter does it, because, come on , they need to make money. And they don’t have conventional ads. Also, they don’t do it in your feed. Your feed is still a chronological list of what people tweeted. They do it in search results. Facebook is doing it in the news feed. The news feed is no more an algorithmic-ally sorted list of what my friends are doing. It is now sprinkled with ads in between. Seriously, ads b/w content, that’s as stupid as TV. Remember TV? That stupid thing you used to watch before the internet?

And these ‘social ads’ are going to increase. Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, mentions in their IPO roadshow video ( the roadshow video is where a company brainwashes you into believing how awesome it is, so that you buy their stock ) that now, only a small percentage of the feed is sponsored. She was talking about the advertising potential Facebook has.

Not cool Facebook, not cool.

BTW, since we are talking about TV, a fun fact, Aamir Khan is being paid Rs. 3 crores  ( 562K $ ) for his show Satyamev Jayate ( It premieres today at 11 o’clock in the morning ). To put this in perspective, Aston Kutcher gets 700K $ ( 3.74 crores ) for his show Two And A Half Men. I am not comparing the two actors, I am comparing a Bollywood actor to a Hollywood actor in general. When did we get so rich? This shit cray!

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2 responses to “Ads in my Facebook news feed!”

  1. […] potential. At this point Facebook is running multiple experiments, including a new market place and paid for stories in the feed. Some of them will fail, for sure, but a few will be successful. Basically, just looking at […]

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