Facebook has been on a bit of a role lately. Its stock has surged in recent weeks, reaching its highest level since May of last year, and traffic has significantly increased on their mobile apps while the chairman himself, Mark Zuckerberg, has seen his personal net worth grow by 37% after it rose by $3.8 billion in just one day on July 24. Now, Facebook is ready to pull off its next big move, one that might annoy its users more than a year-long "poke" battle.
News has come out that the social network is set to place un-skipable, 15 second video ads smack dab in the middle of your news feed to add even more revenue to the company that has launched Zuckerber to the no. 42 spot on Bloomberg's billionaire list. Meanwhile, the 88 to 100 million people that Facebook says are on its site during primetime hours should prove to be enticing for a whole wave of companies that will have to pay a hefty price to bug FB users.
According to Yahoo!, companies will have to pay Facebook $2.5 million per day to place video ads on the site, a per-second rate that makes the social network's ads more expensive than superbowl ads, which cost companies $4 million for 30 seconds of commercial time.
The amount of bombardment, however, will be limited. Bloomberg reports that users will not see more than three ads fly across their screens per day. Furthermore, companies will only be able to target the over 1.15 billion Facebook users using age and gender as relevant demographics.
Zuckerberg has said that he plans to limit ads to about one per every 20 updates for users in hopes the commercials won't lower users' satisfaction with the site.
“One of the things I watch most closely is the quality of our ads and people’s sentiment around them,” Zuckerberg said. “We haven’t measured a meaningful drop in satisfaction.”
