Nervous About Backlash, Facebook Moves Cautiously on Video Ads; CEO Zuckerberg Tries to Find Right Balance for Users and Advertisers
August 9, 2013 Leave a comment
August 8, 2013, 4:41 p.m. ET
Nervous About Backlash, Facebook Moves Cautiously on Video Ads
CEO Zuckerberg Tries to Find Right Balance for Users and Advertisers
EVELYN M. RUSLI and SUZANNE VRANICA
Facebook’s coming big play for video ads will unlock a new market for the social network’s booming ad business–but it will also present the greatest test of Facebook’s commitment to its user experience. Evelyn Rusli reports on The News Hub. Photo: Facebook.
Facebook Inc. FB -0.85% has been planning for months to dive into the lucrative market for online video ads. The holdup: CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to annoy its 1.1 billion members. As soon as this fall, Facebook plans to launch a video-ad service that will show members 15-second-or-less clips on both smartphones and the Web, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Facebook needs the ads to be sufficiently splashy that they will convince brands to fork over roughly $2 million per day. Yet since earlier this year, Mr. Zuckerberg and his engineers have toiled over how to make the ads not so distracting and slow that they alienate users, according to current and former employees and advertisers. The videos will appear prominently on members’ homepage news feeds, the people familiar said. Read more of this post