Facebook launched stories 14 months back and since then Facebook Stories have gained a lot of popularity. According to a report, Facebook stories has 150 million daily active users count for its Snapchat Stories clone. The company has now decided that it’s time to earn some money from it as well. Facebook Stories will now start testing its first ads today.
Facebook ad Stories will be up to 5-15-second video ads which the users cannot skip. Facebook plans to add this feature in the coming months. Advertisers can also extend their Instagram Stories ads to this new surface, or even have Facebook automatically reformat their News Feed ads with color-matched borders and text at the bottom.
Facebook also plans to give advertisers more metrics on their Stories performance to convince them the feature is worth their ad dollars. The company has to nail Stories ads to preserve its business, as CPO Chris Cox said this month that Stories sometime next year will surpass feed posts as the top way to share.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg warned that the company must ensure that “ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.”
With existing Facebook and Instagram advertisers able to easily port their ads over to Facebook Stories, and have much greater total reach. Advertisers might not go to the trouble of advertising on Snapchat unless they seek millennials. Facebook Stories could be the answer to Facebook’s issue with running out of ad space in the News Feed while it shuts down its sidebar units.
Stories were inevitable. First launched by Snapchat in October 2013, it took almost three years for Facebook to wake up to the format as an existential threat to the company. Although with the quick success of Instagram’s clone, the company has wisely swallowed its pride and pivoted its apps toward this style of visual communication.
What do you think about this new Ad feature in Facebook stories? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
