When Facebook filed for a $5billion IPO last month, it admitted that it wasn't making money from its 425million mobile users. So today's announcement that brands will now be able to place both Premium Ads and Sponsored Stories in the mobile news feed comes as no surprise.
Sponsored Stories are news feed items relating to a brand that have occured naturally, but the brand has paid to make them more prominent. For example, if a user carries out some activity relating to the Starbucks page, that might generate a news story that appears on their friends' feeds – just as any other activity might. Starbucks can then pay to have the news story displayed more prominently.
Premium ads will be displayed in the News Feeds, on desktop and mobile, of people who have Liked that brand. So if these get irritating then a user can get rid of them by unliking. If you're not connected to a brand, they can still put an ad in your sidebar on the desktop site.
Both types of content have a small label which reads "Sponsored" or "Featured". It was also announced that there will now be ads on the logout screen.
Facebook enters mobile ad market
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