Ready for Facebook to get even more annoying? Video ads are coming later this year, but Facebook, of course, has high, high standards for them. Namely, you have to cough up $2.5 million for a one-day rotation.
Why, precisely, does Facebook want that much money? Because it theoretically has a lot of eyeballs, especially during “prime time”, which tells us how little the old people buying advertising understand the Internet:
With Facebook, the idea would be to capitalize on the millions of users who actively check the site on a daily basis, including during the prime-time hours coveted by television advertisers. As of last quarter, 61 percent of Facebook members were using the site daily — a number that has risen despite management predictions that it would decline.
Yeah, somehow, Facebook, we’re pretty sure once Charmin’s prancing sh*tbears start making us pay the toll to look at our friends sharing movie trailers, you’re going to see a decline in daily use. The good news is that there’s a three-playback limit. For now; this being Facebook we’re sure that will rapidly become “flexible” the more money is sitting on the table.
To be fair, ads are how you pay the toll for content; every professional site on the web has them, of course. But one can’t help but feel Facebook is a different case. If a blogger or a filmmaker (or a TV show) is asking you to look at a fifteen second ad, that’s to collect a paycheck so they can keep making original content. The “content” on Facebook is generated by us; essentially Facebook wants to impose a fifteen-second ad on you before you can talk to your friends.
That might be a harder sell than Facebook realizes, especially since this is the latest round in more and more advertising on the site. The key point of Facebook is that it’s easier to keep up with people you know, but how many ads will the site throw at its users before that convenience becomes a hassle? It seems one way or the other, we’re about to find out.