Being known for assigning minimum amount of space for Ads Section in their pages, Facebook now takes another leap towards Advertising Efforts, by planning to bring Sponsored Ads in the content located in the Site-Wide Ticker. So, along with the regular activities about your friends, now you would also see them help in Advertising whenever their task is related to a Story assigned for Advertising.
Infiltrating Ticker in such way would greatly increase Facebook’s ad production, but it may also irritate users when they face a swarm of sponsored activities in their friends’ activity section. Thus, the response by users would decide the fate of this Sponsored site-wide Ticker.
The concept of Sponsored Stories came last year in February and it penetrated first into the Sidebar and then into the App and Games Activity Ticker. This attempt was however, accepted by users without any significant notice and it brought great revenue to Facebook since then. Earlier reports depict that the Sponsored Stories had 46 % Higher Click Through Rate than standard ads.
Facebook PR’s Annie Ta told, “Starting on Monday, we are continuing to slowly roll out Sponsored Stories in ticker across Facebook.” Thus, you would all soon notice the word “Sponsored” below some(or maybe many) of your friends’ activities in the Ticker.
This is just another attempt to engulf the Network with Social Advertising, which was present in many other forms like Sponsored Social Pages, Ads based on user search terms, Interests and other user activities. Facebook’s ad czar Gokul Rajaram says, “he envisions a future where all of Facebook’s ads include social content or context.”
Playing safe though, Facebook is steps behind other networks like Twitter, where Ads have entered into the mainstream (which is News Feed in Facebook’s case). Otherwise, it would have affected some user’s experience since, News Feeds is much more diverse and detailed than Twitter’s Stream.
Its good that Ticker keeps scrolling itself, and lets just hope that they don’t have plans for infiltrating News Feed too.
Utkarsh Mishra
Emerging Blogger, Web Designer/Administrator, pursuing Engineering with Computer Science.
Passionate about Web 2.0, Innovative Ideas and their Implementations and Startups.