Facebook To Start Placing Advertisements In News Feeds

Next year, Facebook will introduce some changes that advertisers will love but users will probably hate.

Beginning in January 2012, Facebook will start including "sponsored stories" in the site's news feed. "Sponsored" in this case is code for "paid for by an advertiser." Basically, every day users will see advertisements pop up in their news feeds. The ads will only be for companies that users have "liked" on Facebook, and will be limited to only one ad per day. Also, users will not be able to opt out of seeing the ads, they will only be able to "x" out the individual ads.

I've always said that Facebook is a powerful tool for advertisers, and this sort of hyper-targeting of individual users is a perfect example of this. This kind of feature could be a huge boon to the advertisers. However, I think the everyday users who are already irritated with Facebook will just have something new to complain about, especially since you can't opt out of the ads.

Personally, I really don't mind if ads start appearing in my news feed. Ads have already invaded every other kind of media, why not social media as well?