Ads on Facebook

Remember when the ALS Ice Bucket challenge got so big even the President of UBC participated? For those of you who don’t know, the Ice Bucket Challenge was a video revolution involving approximately 440 million users that raised $94 million for the ALS association. The platform for the Ice Bucket Challenge was mainly Facebook, who’s video product was greatly driven by the ALS challenge. Although Facebook video’s value proposition was originally intended for users to conveniently post about daily life and share content from other platforms, the popularity of the ALS challenge has allowed the company to compete directly with video giant Youtube for ad revenue. In fact, Facebook may be considering the adoption of video ads,  and while this may seem appealing, I don’t believe the implementation of video ads is a step in the right direction for the company. Currently, the layout of Facebook allows for videos to be automatically played when scrolling down the homepage and unlike Youtube, videos like the Ice Bucket challenge are no more than than a one or two minutes in length. It simply wouldn’t make sense for a user to sit through an advertisement for the sake of watching such a short video. The implementation of video ads could result in users searching for alternatives to post such videos, and besides, aren’t we annoyed enough by those ads at the beginning of Youtube videos already?

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