Facebook Now Lets Users Vote on Ads
Facebook quietly added the ability for users to vote up or down on ads last night. Facebook watcher Nick O'Neill points out that the site has recently gotten rid of the same voting feature that was in the Newsfeed for a short period of time. Will this work for ads?
Initially we thought this would be an ineffective effort, but the more we looked at terrible ads on Facebook and thought about how happy we'd be to vote them down - the more sense it made.
Startup founder Rob Webb blogged about the feature first and saw the most complex version we've seen reported yet. (Image below) In our own experience the voting interface is a little bit flakey right now.
On Brand Advertising
There are of course a wide variety of ads in the world and on Facebook in particular. Charlene Li reported an unusually high success rate for her "Facebook Flyer" test ad in October, but that was a call to action that some portion of her audience had a more vested interest in than we do in most Facebook ads.
Brand ads are intended to build brand association with audiences and in those cases voting from audiences could make sense. Do you like seeing ads from this known brand or that one in your social networking site? That makes sense, as the primary intention behind such ads isn't click through - it's just awareness.
Crap Control
The majority of ads we see on Facebook's sidebar "social ads" section aren't brand ads though. They are crap. They are personal ads, debt relief services and other things most of us could care less about.
The more we think about it, the better the opportunity to vote down such ads sounds. We can't help but wonder how many Facebook users would pay a small fee to remove ads all-together from the site.
Facebook has done something similar with applications, allowing apps that get installed more often to have more access to the Newsfeed. The company is clearly experimenting with both using both implicit and explicit gestures to determine quality on the site.
That sounds smart.
Voting may not have worked well in the Newsfeed, but that could be because the visual prompt to vote was too intrusive. Offering one place to vote, just on ads in the sidebar, should be less annoying to users.
We're not seeing options this extensive yet, what are you seeing when you vote on the ads in the Facebook sidebar?
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FAIL++
What a horrible idea. Facebook is requiring their members to do their dirty work for them. Basically, what they're saying is they really have no idea what ads to show you based on the mountains of demographic (and more) data they have on you. They don't know and other than using CPU power to determine that, they want YOU to take YOUR time and tell THEM how to make money off of YOU. Lame.
I think this is evidence their ads aren't converting well.
My suggestion - send them a message, vote every ad down.
Johnny, I hear what you're saying but surely some of this is legit. Shouldn't services allow users to provide feedback on the way they are targeted?
I think it's a decent idea. It really does no harm to Facebook, and gets users to both focus on ads to vote, or help advertisers by giving input. It's a no lose situation for any of the parties involved.
I'm not a facebook user, but that's a great idea! I ignore ads that don't "involve" me (yeah, I whack the occasional monkey in those flash ads). Getting to rank them, would make me feel more interactive with them and more interested in paying attention to 'em. That instantly makes them more effective when it comes to visitors like myself.
I suppose it depends on how much you value your time.
If Facebook setup some kind of compensation model, either directly in the form of paying you every time you voted for an advertisement, or indirectly by giving you a discount on whatever the advertisement was selling - then it would be of value.
Some might say this is a way to "pay" Facebook for using their services, but they have a $15 billion dollar valuation. Should the very members that gave them that valuation also foot-the-bill because they're not smart enough to figure out how to make money? The "payment" you are giving them is personal information. The fact they can't do anything with all that "money" (data), is their problem to solve...not offload on me.
By asking members to vote on advertisements, they're proving (quantifiably) that they're not smart enough to use all the data they already have to come up with a clever way to convert all the page views they have to actual dollars. Now, they're asking for more. "We can't figure it out, it's too hard...please tell us".
It would be like Amazon, instead of suggesting books you might like based on your previous purchases, they ask you to read about a book and tell them if you think you would like it.
-jf
This is kind of like the next step beyond what Google has done with their syndicated AdSense ads where you'll often see the little arrows in the corner of the ad space so that you can scroll through the ads. Sounds stupid at first and I imagine the novelty will quickly wear off. But it's another call-to-action in the ad space.
As an advertiser who's used Facebook, I can tell you because of the EXTREMELY low cost and the nature of the Facebook environment that's why you're generally not going to see as many recognizable brands advertising in the space (despite the fact that there's a huge audience.) Some brands still just have a lot of trepidation putting their message in the space. For the brands with a good demographic match and/or strong message that have ventured in there though, it's actually not a bad deal. The ads generally perform HORRIBLY compared to traditional sites like Yahoo. But the cost is absolutely dirt cheap (even by online standards) so you really don't care. You can take chances there that you wouldn't be willing to do on more expensive sites.
It's a great idea. I wish I could send instant feedback on broadcast television ads too. MySpace also desperately needs this feature. I hardly even notice the ads on Facebook, but the ads on MySpace frequently upstage the featured content.
I take it back. Not all of it, of course. I still don't really like Facebook, and I certainly don't trust them.
But I am ALL FOR THE EXPLICIT when it comes to advertising. I haven't logged in to FB in months, but this is enough to make me go there just to cast my votes.
@ 1&5: Do you really not want to have any input into what ads you're served? Do you really want some faceless marketing lackeys, or worse yet, a set of (as you implied) really inept algorithms to decide for you what will be thrown on your screen?
By asking their users for opinions, they are offering some measure of control to their users. I only hope the users are smart enough to take advantage of it.
I would love to see this applied to the entire internet.
Johnny is right on. Facebook is essentially drafting its user base as an unpaid focus group for the various organizations that advertise on its pages. This will make Facebook more valuable to marketers at the expense of its users, who will waste their time voting on ads in a futile effort to rid themselves of ubiquitous ad-noyance.
As the web has become the new gold rush, it will become more and more difficult to find innovative ways to communicate that aren't just cloaked money machines.
Oddly enough, I don't seem to have the ability to do this on ads in my facebook account.
I think it's a great idea. If users use it reguarly, it ups the relevance of ads and hopefully will get rid of some of the annoying ones. I really don't need to see any more "singles in your area" ads -- I'm 100% not interested in those.
One thing you seem to have missed is that regardless of your vote, the fact that you voted constitutes an interaction with the ad and a proof that you have actually noticed it. In other words, the data has implications beyond whether voters like the ads or don't like them. The biggest problem of display ads on the web is that users don't really see them. If facebook has proof that ads are being noticed by at least a certain percentage of their web traffic, then they can use that to promote the site for brand advertising (where the purpose is to get you to see the ad, more than it is to get you to interact with it through clicks).
What is the point of this? I have better things to do with my time than voting on ad's.