Facebook continues its plan to basically be nothing but ads by this time next year. This go-round, they’re bringing those ads to the right that you always ignore front and center on your Feed.
To be fair, Facebook says this won’t change the number of ads that you see: Essentially it’s just changing the link redirect to take you to another site instead of a Facebook page. The difference may seem relatively minor but it’s apparently a big deal to advertising buyers:
Previously, Facebook allowed advertisers to run FBX-delivered ads on the right-hand side on the desktop. This unit’s format, called “Page post link ads” in Facebook speak, is more familiar to traditional display ad buyers than Facebook’s own native ad unit, the Sponsored Story, because advertisers can tap their own user intent data for targeting purposes and direct people to outside landing pages, instead of Facebook Pages, for conversion-tracking.
Why is Facebook doing this? Why else? Money. Facebook still has a lot to prove to Wall Street about how it can grow revenue and be worth lots of money, and introducing a new ad strategy that, like it or not, will be more effective for your ad buyers is a pretty good way to do that.
Of course, this is far from the only ad strategy Facebook is pursuing, so you might want to keep an eye out for when Facebook decides to just go all ads, all the time.