> “Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they’re not a tack on,” said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of engineering for advertising and pages.
I get the point that Facebook is ad-supported. But to spin that as "ads are a part of the Facebook experience" is like saying that 'throwing up is part of a rollercoaster ride experience' (please make a better analogy if you will).
I don't use the FB apps because apps are more intrusive with respect to the information collected and don't give me adequate control. Instead, I use the FB site from a desktop browser with an ad blocker to have a cleaner experience. And I know it really is clean because I do try to turn off the ad blocker every once in a while to see how crappy it can be.
The FB experience on the desktop is terrible with ads. I don't want to see "earn so much in a day", "play poker and make money" and all kinds of nonsense on the right. These ads are in addition to the sponsored stories and stuff that get pushed into the news feed. I don't want to really tell Facebook what ads I like and what my interests are so that I can be fooled by some brand or seller into paying more, part of which would fuel Facebook ads even more.
For a long time, people who've been reading about the web and online advertisements have known about banner blindness. [1][2] For some strange reason, those who want to serve ads ignore this or don't want to acknowledge this.
Facebook's ads on the desktop are easily ignored by banner blindness, but I don't want to even get those downloaded and waste my bandwidth or Internet traffic limit. While Facebook claimed a big victory with "native ads" on mobile, I'd be willing to bet that many users on mobile have learned banner blindness to these too and just quickly scroll past these ads or sponsored stories inserted into news feeds. They're very easy to spot and take perhaps a few hundred milliseconds for the brain to recognize and act on. For the advertisers paying for impressions, this is a bad deal because it's not valuable at all. But of course, Facebook can make (false) claims that this is better than sidebar ads.
People generally do not like ads on any medium because they waste people's time and keep them from the content they're interested in. People do not want to get targeted ads if they know that all their actions are being tracked and be given the euphemism of "a better experience" with it. It doesn't matter how you spin it or what excuses you make for shoving ads into a user's experience. Given a chance, people will skip ads in every communication medium.
The only ads people enjoy are the ones that are really thoughtful or funny or move them in some way to make the world a better place. These are really few and far between, and even they have a limit to the number of times people will put up with or want to see and share. The rest of the ads are just examples in wasting money and human thought.
I get the point that Facebook is ad-supported. But to spin that as "ads are a part of the Facebook experience" is like saying that 'throwing up is part of a rollercoaster ride experience' (please make a better analogy if you will).
I don't use the FB apps because apps are more intrusive with respect to the information collected and don't give me adequate control. Instead, I use the FB site from a desktop browser with an ad blocker to have a cleaner experience. And I know it really is clean because I do try to turn off the ad blocker every once in a while to see how crappy it can be.
The FB experience on the desktop is terrible with ads. I don't want to see "earn so much in a day", "play poker and make money" and all kinds of nonsense on the right. These ads are in addition to the sponsored stories and stuff that get pushed into the news feed. I don't want to really tell Facebook what ads I like and what my interests are so that I can be fooled by some brand or seller into paying more, part of which would fuel Facebook ads even more.
For a long time, people who've been reading about the web and online advertisements have known about banner blindness. [1][2] For some strange reason, those who want to serve ads ignore this or don't want to acknowledge this.
Facebook's ads on the desktop are easily ignored by banner blindness, but I don't want to even get those downloaded and waste my bandwidth or Internet traffic limit. While Facebook claimed a big victory with "native ads" on mobile, I'd be willing to bet that many users on mobile have learned banner blindness to these too and just quickly scroll past these ads or sponsored stories inserted into news feeds. They're very easy to spot and take perhaps a few hundred milliseconds for the brain to recognize and act on. For the advertisers paying for impressions, this is a bad deal because it's not valuable at all. But of course, Facebook can make (false) claims that this is better than sidebar ads.
People generally do not like ads on any medium because they waste people's time and keep them from the content they're interested in. People do not want to get targeted ads if they know that all their actions are being tracked and be given the euphemism of "a better experience" with it. It doesn't matter how you spin it or what excuses you make for shoving ads into a user's experience. Given a chance, people will skip ads in every communication medium.
The only ads people enjoy are the ones that are really thoughtful or funny or move them in some way to make the world a better place. These are really few and far between, and even they have a limit to the number of times people will put up with or want to see and share. The rest of the ads are just examples in wasting money and human thought.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
[2]: http://nngroup.com/articles/banner-blindness-old-and-new-fin...