Facebook on Tuesday announced that “Sponsored Stories” are now appearing on the pages of each users Facebook account via the new “ticker” option located on the far upper right hand corner of their screens.
Still under a great deal of scrutiny by Facebook users who don’t like the new News Feed and Ticker revamp that rolled out in September the new feature places ads directly inside a users ticker right next to other status updates, link shares and other information from their friends list.
The plan is part of Facebook’s inevitable push to have as much information as possible placed in front of users, for example Spotify playlists can now be seen in a users profile.
Speaking about their decision to add the sponsored feature into their news feed a Facebook rep noted:
“Sponsored Stories now appear in Ticker on the home page, Sponsored Stories are an extension of News Feed, so we think it’s natural that they appear in Ticker.”
By placing the ads in the ticker feed rather than directly in a users news feed it appears that Facebook is attempting to serve more advertisements while at the same time avoiding page overload by serving up ads where users are now necessarily focusing their attention and by extension their interaction.
While users can not opt-out of the new sponsored ticker posts they can click on the “X” button in each post to hide updates as they roll in.
The sponsored posts feature has worked well for Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other networks, it will be interesting to see how it pans out for Facebook.
Will sponsored stories in your ticker feed annoy you?
