Facebook Messenger Is Rolling Out Distracting Autoplaying Video Ads

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Facebook Messenger will now play host to distracting video ads that immediately play, as the company confirmed on Tuesday, June 19. These intrusive clips will start playing as soon as users scroll on them, in an effort to catch the eye of users who are scrolling through their messages.

The new "feature" has already started rolling out to a subset of Messenger users, according to a Facebook representative via Quartz. The social media platform assured its users, though, that the roll-out of these invasive video ads will be done "gradually and thoughtfully," whatever the company meant by that statement.

"People that use Messenger each month are our top priority and they will remain in control of their experience," Facebook said in a statement, but by remaining "in control," in practice that would mean that users will only be able to hide a video ad one at a time, or report it.

There's no way to opt out of Facebook Messenger ads altogether, as things stand right now.

It's the next step from Facebook's ambitions to fill the Messenger apps with ads for maximum advertising revenue like what the social media platform has already done more than a year ago, as Recode pointed out. Not content with static ads, Facebook is now giving advertisers the option to buy video ad placement in Messenger.

Even Stefanos Loukakos, who runs Messenger's ad business, is not entirely sure that their users will like the new auto-playing ads that will soon distract them from the messages they are looking for. "Top priority for us is user experience," Loukakos claimed.

"So we don't know yet [if these will work]. However, signs until now, when we tested basic ads, didn't show any changes with how people used the platform or how many messages they send," he added, while hedging that auto-playing video may have users reacting differently.

"But we don't believe so," he added.