Facebook, along with virtually every other social media platform, generates the vast majority of its revenue through advertisements. One of the most unique things about Facebook, in terms of differentiating itself from other forms of advertisement or marketing, is that its data processing abilities – some would say overreaching abilities, or theft of data – allow advertisers to target specific demographics of customers with particular interests in pinpointed locations, or even across the world.
The social platform recently announced – just yesterday, on Friday, April 21, 2018 – that it would begin showing commercials immediately prior to watching videos in more places than ever before. These ads are better known as pre-roll advertisements, as users are required to watch them prior to consuming their digital content.
In the past, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, had banned such advertisements, though it seems money comes first for a site drawing in hundreds of billions of dollars each year, like Facebook.
It’s said, at least as reported by digital marketing authority Ad Age, that Facebook had tested such advertisements in Watch – a place ot watch videos through the website, similar to how people use Messenger to message one another – a full year ago. Vice President of media partnerships Nick Grudin and product management director Maria Angelidou-Smith both indicated in a blog post that, “Earlier this year we began testing pre-roll in Watch.”
This means that videos will pop up virtually everywhere on the site: within Watch, of course; search results; other users’ Page timelines; among others. However, one place where pre-roll advertisements won’t, in fact, be shown is on people’s News Feeds, which is the list of posts from pages you follow or friend on Facebook – in other words, it’s the main thing people look at when they browse Facebook.
Far too many Internet users, in general, disagree with the presence of pre-roll ads, as they’re rated with more negative connotations than any other form of ad content on the market, as such commercials create an impenetrable barrier between themselves and content they wish to consume, with the only means of removing it being actually trudging through the advertisement.
Both Twitter and YouTube use pre-roll ads, making it more appropriate and less ground-breaking if Facebook entered the fray. Facebook will not have any pre-roll ads longer than six seconds, at least to start.
Dil Bole Oberoi
