Facebook opens mobile apps advertising for all Facebook is looking to make more money from its mobile users by opening up their smartphones to application developers looking to make a sale. The service, which went on beta trial in August, will see developers bidding on Facebook's advertising system to place adverts for their applications in the feeds of mobile users. These …
Most of the screen space flashing ads at you, this is a sure way to put people off.
Smacks do desperation especially as it is well known that Facebook is all about 'look at me everyone, look how cool I am' and that it is well known that advertising on Facebook suffers from a poor conversion rate and even less into money.
I don't know about the rest of you, but while I can deal with advertising on a computer with tons of screenspace (as a proper Reg reader, I won't touch systems with low res screens) and an accurate mouse for clicking close boxes, and a fast processor and GPU to power the garish flash animations, and plenty of RAM to store the advertisements on .
My phone has none of those things. An advertisement takes up a large amount of precious screenspace (even on my Galaxy Note, I can't spare the screen real estate! God help the people with 3.x inch screens). I need to get the stylus out to hit the tiny close box on those horrible popup advertisements that don't open in their own tabs, and I frequently hit the wrong link when using my fingers, and could easily open an advert by mistake. And unlike a computer, where a quick press of the back button will get me out of such a mistake and pay hardly any penalty in time, on a mobile app this will start a new app to handle the ad mis-touch, which won't respond to the back button until it's done starting up, only to be exited.
And I think this is the problem with advertising on mobiles, and why it hasn't been as profitable as companies would like - advertising is much more disruptive to the user experience on mobile devices - computers can handle it because they've got specs so far in excess of what's needed for most tasks; the inconvenience is countered by brute force. Mobile devices are still back in the late 90's, when bad advertisements could make a page unusable without some means of blocking ads. Which makes users much more hostile to advertisements, and sets up a more adversarial relationship between the ad and the user.
I wonder what will spam news feeds more. The advertisements or people posting "thumbs up /share/join my page if you agree Facebook should remove the adverts" posts. Many of the latter types don't seem to grasp the fact that Facebook is in the advertising business and they are their bitches part of their product.
Similar schemes may have had limited success in the past but due to the massive share price tank due in no small part to the mobile market I doubt Facebook will be willing to move much, if at all, on the issue.
We are Facebook, we will add your biological and technological perversions to our database, resistance is hidden in the privacy settings where you will never find it.
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