Yes, Facebook is planning to do something incredibly annoying. Again.
This time, in order to please the corporate wolves and try to get TV-grade advertising dollars, it’s planning on putting unskippable, autoplaying video ads on your Wall. Oh, and it’ll be for both desktop and mobile.
According to AdAge, this will be getting up in your grill and making goofing off at work that much harder starting this April:
Facebook is still debating several product features, but has decided on this much to date, these executives said: By April at the latest, it will offer video advertisers the chance to target video ads to large numbers of Facebook users in their news feeds on both the desktop version of Facebook as well as on Facebook apps on mobile phones and tablets.
Oh, and they’ll expand out of the sides of the screen, too, covering your feed. And Facebook “hasn’t decided” whether the audio portion will automatically kick on. They’re also leaning heavily on pushing these ads to mobile, you know, so you can actually pay, out of your pocket, for these ads to stream right when you don’t want to see them.
The good side is that Facebook is going to limit the ads to fifteen seconds, which might make that the new standard for ads around the Web. That said, we can sum up how we think this will go over in one image:
Advertising is a reality of working on the web, of course, and Facebook has every right to advertise how it sees fit: It’s their website, after all. That said, though, it is kind of hard to read their plans and not wonder how they think this will go over with their userbase.
But, hell, it’s not like the old pitchfork is getting any sharper!