If you’re annoyed by the Facebook news ticker already, just you wait. Facebook confirmed today that it has introduced sponsored stories, or ads, to the ticker.
“Sponsored Stories now appear in Ticker on the home page,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “Sponsored Stories are an extension of News Feed, so we think it’s natural that they appear in Ticker.”
The ticker first appeared to mixed reviews when Facebook revamped News Feed in early September. It’s intended to be a repository for those quick, repetitive messages like “Jill Liked Flying Kites” or “Dave and Floyd are now friends,” leaving meatier status updates to the main feed.
At the same time, the different kinds of updates that could appear in the ticker expanded, with services like Spotify introducing the ability to automatically share what you’re listening to via the new feature.
The new approach, and the ticker specifically, received tepid reviews from Facebook users, and some reacted with outright anger. Among the more pointed criticisms: If the ticker updates weren’t important enough for the main feed, why have them at all?
It appears part of the answer may be for the ticker to serve Facebook’s growing advertising platform. After all, if users aren’t paying that much attention to it, they may be less inclined to complain about advertising occasionally appearing there. While there’s no way to opt-out of seeing the sponsored content, users will be able to click the “X” in the post to hide the updates, just like regular ticker items.
The inclusion of sponsored posts among regular ones will be familiar to any user of Twitter, Digg, and other networks. Sponsored content in various “feeds” is rapidly becoming the norm in social media, although most services clearly mark the content as such.
