Nobody outside a few advertising partners has even seen Facebook’s coming video ads, but already the sky is falling. Critics are labeling the social network a “super troll” (whatever that means) for its plan to “blast” the “intrusive” ads into news feeds and predicting that the ads will annoy users so much that they’ll be driven away.
That’s doubtful. Here’s why:
* There won’t be all that many of them. Despite complaints about the increasing ad load, you can still scroll through many screens before you encounter more than an ad or two. You can bet that Facebook will be very careful about letting advertisers run too many of these things. Anyway, relatively few advertisers will be allowed to run them or, at $2 million for a day, afford them.
* You’re already seeing video ads on Facebook anyway. Marketers have been creating video posts on their Facebook page and then running those posts as ads. So it’s not as if these new video ads are all that new. The new part is that they will play automatically. “We’d note that we’ve personally been seeing autoplay video in our newsfeed on desktop recently, and been pleasantly surprised that it actually improves the user experience, in our view,” Macquarie Securities analyst Benjamin Schachter said in a note to clients today. “The auto-play feature is relatively unobtrusive and calls our attention to the video without expanding over other content or playing audio. We can see how it could increase video views on Facebook meaningfully.” …
Robert Hof 