Facebook introduces 15-second video ads that auto-play without sound | Hacker News Reader

Facebook introduces 15-second video ads that auto-play without sound

thenextweb.com

46 pointstweakz43 comments

"Facebook says it is taking steps to ensure video ads that appear on its site “are as good as other content people see in their News Feeds.”"

My buttocks randomly bouncing up and down the keyboard could produce better content than most of the stuff I saw on my news feed when I was on facebook, so that's not exactly going to be difficult...

More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.

I honestly don't know how people put up with it.

And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default? For these large corporations or institutions, I imagine a significant percentage of bandwidth is wasted on "content" (and i use that word in its loosest possible sense) no one really wants to access...

Can you send me some of that random-butt-bouncing text?

Better yet, a 15 second silent video?

|More seriously and with (slightly) less snark, I'm always shocked when I surf the internet at work with no ad-blocker. Pop-ups, irritating garish backgrounds, "content" plastered everywhere, and of course, annoying video ads. Its like a bad episode of Futurama; some horrible dystopian disfigurement of the internet.

As the CPM (money you receive per thousand views of an ad) of internet ads has plummeted over the years, sites are resorting to larger and more annoying ads because they pay better.

|And the other thing that gets me is why don't government/private business install ad-blockers by default?

Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

> Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

You could turn that argument on the head. When you're blocking ads, you're preventing advertisers from wasting money on you, as you wouldn't have bought anything anyways (for me, annoying online advertising actually lowers the perception of the brand). So, you're doing advertisers a favour by blocking the ads.

The counter to that argument is that an advertiser may not care that you will click the ad, they just want you to be exposed to the product.

Coke has done this for years and many claim this is their key to their globally recognizable brand.

Funny that we both mentioned coke... that's the power of advertising.

I've not met a single person that "likes" advertising, but it works very well despite people's disdain for it (look at coke's market cap and tell me advertising isn't effective).

Advertising is a tricky science, it might be effective on you or it might not. But it is effective on most people, including I would wager, the vast majority of people who block ads.

Ads are often chosen based on a real time auction. You see an ad because someone won an action to show you an ad. Their bidder had the option of not showing you an ad.

Ad-blockers may be a moral grey area, but I'm reasonably confident that there's no ambiguity about their legality (ie, they're totally legal).

Fair enough.

And this is one of the reasons why i'm shocked they aren't used. Its seems like a clear win. Cut down on bandwidth use by your employees for relatively little/practically no effort + employees would be happier.

And when have we known a big corporation/government to care about a moral grey area that is legal and in their interests? Hell, that describes half of their operations and even some companies!

> Ad-blockers are a legal grey area. You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

If they want to guarantee what code runs on my computer, doing it via a web browser is not the way to go. There is no actual or implied contract between me and the site owner. Site owners have the option of detecting and blocking my adblock-using-traffic. It's not supremely difficult.

> Ad-blockers are a legal grey area.

Not under any legal system I am familiar with.

> You are costing the service provider valuable resources without giving back anything in return.

No, the service provider is dumping a mass of content at you without asking for payment, and you are selecting which of that content you wish to view (and using an automated tool to implement that decision.)

Now, the service provider may be anticipating that some percentage of users will view the ads, but that's not an bargained-for-exchange, and its generally not a legally binding obligation of any users. It may be a moral gray area, but that's a different issue.

FB is clearly gasping for every last bit of money lately. Other day I saw nearly every ad on right of my page like it was a porn website. Each ad features scantly naked women with captions like "She wants you now". When you click on those links you land of completely irrelevant websites trying to push some maleware.

I've run a lot of Facebook ads before and I keep very close attention to the ads that are shown on Facebook. In their defense, they have over a million advertisers, they can't catch everything. Many scammy advertisers will be on one day and banned the next, I would hope. Though, it's definitely possible they are more lenient on certain advertisers now that money is even more important.

The more things you 'like' on Facebook, the better the targeting will be. Considering I work in marketing and visit a lot of sites at the office, I'm constantly getting retargeting ads. Less so the scammy dating ones (though it happens).

Did you find your Facebook ads profitable? We've experimented with them a lot, and have never been able to get a reasonable return on them. However, our goal has been driving actual sales of a product, not just getting Likes (as many ads seem to be doing).

@zippergz: I do ads at a performance based marketing company. For some clients Facebook is great at driving tons of volume with good performance. I've also seen clients who pay a bunch for user-signups and it doesn't back out to sales for their particular product. Buying likes is something people do more for brand awareness (not so different than say McDonalds buying a TV commercial but can't measure the exact ROI).

I think the difference often comes down to how well you set up your campaign. There is often a razor thin line between profitability and losing money in a performance-based campaign you're tying directly to sales.

If you'd like to ping me at jonathan@hypedsound.com or let me know through here what your product is, I might be able to guess at whether it seems feasible.

Well, it is a publicly-traded company now. When a shareholder sees the opportunity to make a dime, he'll seize it.

Yeah, I called it as soon as they started auto-playing friends' videos in our news feeds. They were clearly just getting us accustomed to the idea of stopping scrolling so they know we'll see these ads.

Facebook is slowly becoming more like Myspace when it lost the lead.

Except they have the money the buy any latest hyped app.

So this means mobile users get to pay the data costs for ad bandwidth?

On mobile devices, all videos that begin playing as they appear on the screen will have been downloaded in advance when the device was connected to WiFi — meaning this content will not consume data plans, even if you’re not connected to WiFi at the time of playback

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/Testing-a-New-Way-for...

I wonder if this is how the functionality works in Instagram. I was pretty disappointed last week when a video auto-played while I was using my data (200mb per month plan).

If not, then it'd be nice if they could try to stay consistent across platforms.

Wow just wow, so adds are silently infecting your device only to be produced at the right( read: worst ) moment.

Which can royally screw people who are tethering via Wifi to a mobile device or mobile hotspot.

Yeah, but those are a pretty small minority. A lot of apps have the courtesy check of "don't download songs (photos/videos, whatever) until you're on WiFI". At some point an app has to assume it's safe to download assets, and when you're on WiFi is a pretty safe assumption.

Android, anyways, has a way to mark a WiFi AP as mobile so apps can avoid this.

Oh, cool! Instructions http://www.androidcentral.com/how-tag-wifi-access-points-hot...

Off topic, but this idea that bandwidth has to be carefully thought about and rationed, and resulting avoidance of innovation that uses bandwidth - not that ads are that innovative, but there are many similar situations - is why unlimited bandwidth really has significant benefits, even if the argument that metered bandwidth encourages providers to increase capacity is probably sound.

There are lots of places in the world where bandwidth is rationed for very real reasons, e.g due to oversubscribed cell towers.

Like San Francisco?

Seen on the Register:

Phase 3: Increasingly desperate attempts to monetize the user base. A short but pivotal phase of the social network lifespan that quickly slides into:

Phase 4: The vicious spiral of lame.

So how is facebook going to show value to advertisers from this ad format ?. I could scroll beyond the ad and it might even play to completion.

Just uninstalled FB from my phone to make space for 7.1. I think I'll just keep it off.

In related news, I've introduced FB Purity, NoScript, ABP, and Ghostery to Facebook.

Facebook introduces me blocking its crap.

Hey, that's great, because I can close the tab or even the browser in less than three seconds, and make a noise like "fuck you farcebook"!

I often wonder if the less emotionally developed among us ever ask themselves: "Could I be the one with the problem?"

Sure, it's definitely tough growing up but if we could hack emotional development so we could gain a decade or two of experience, we'd all be a little better off. This quote comes to mind.

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

― Muhammad Ali

There there, we don't mind, and all had excused your emotional development issues. Nurse will be around soon to help out.

Watch out for the hellban son.

Yes, the more mature of us would close the browser in only one second. Or thinking coolly and rationally, block Facebook traffic on our home networks.

Edit: I accept the downvotes for pointless snark, but really, what would maturity look like in this case? Closing the tab with less swearing?

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