Facebook plans to incorporate 15 second TV ads into your newsfeed

Hoping to cash into the lucrative TV-ad market, Facebook will join the likes of YouTube, allowing for television commercials on their website.

Hyder Owainati, Staff Writer

From clickable hashtags to Instagram integration, Facebook has undergone an array of changes since its stock market debut in May of last year. According to reports, the latest addition to your Facebook news-feed will be TV-style commercials.

Advertisers will be able to promote their product or service using a 15-second video snippet that will appear directly in the news-feed alongside regular posts. Videos will be displayed with no sound, only unmuted when users click on the ad.

The social networking giant will be selling video advertisements for as much as $2.5 million each day. The nearly 1.15 billion people registered to the site will likely entice TV marketing executives to make the transition.

Fifteen second long TV-style ads are likely to appear in your Facebook newsfeed as early as this fall.

In contrast to promotional videos uploaded on company “Fan-Pages”, these new video ads will appear in the news-feed regardless of whether the user has liked or subscribed to any relevant pages. Instead, news-feed commercials will target consumers based on age and gender demographics, much like traditional TV-advertising.

Free-to-use services, such as Facebook, Google and YouTube rely on advertising as a key source of revenue. This year alone, advertising is expected to account for nearly $6 billion in revenue for Facebook. The new addition of video ads represents the social network’s first attempt at cashing in on the nearly $75 billion TV ad business.

Apprehensive at the prospect of dismaying Facebook users, site creator Mark Zuckerberg asserts that these new ads will only take up 5% of a user’s news feed. Essentially, one TV-ad will appear for every 20 posts.

Hyder Owainati is a student at the University of Toronto, who loves to write short stories, read books and collect comics. You can follow his work at http://the-three-muses.tumblr.com/