Facebook Goes Premium

After much speculation, Facebook has unveiled its mobile ad offering – Facebook Premium.

Similar to the Promoted Tweets which Twitter introduced to its apps earlier this week, Premium will see ads appear as stories in users newsfeeds on the Facebook apps and mobile site.

At an event in New York, Facebook also announced Offers – which enables companies to present users that like their pages with discounts – and a make-over for brand Pages, bringing them in line with the Timeline layout. But the big news for advertisers is undeniably Premium, Facebooks solution to the problem it identified in its IPO filing – find a way to monetise the 425m-strong userbase on mobile. The company believes that by disguising the ads as stories, the ads will feel less intrusive than traditional banners, but could users react badly?

Marco Veremis, president of Upstream, who warned earlier this week that overloading users with ads could lead to a backlash, thinks so. “Mobile has long been the next target in Facebook’s sights, and speculation has mounted since it identified the lack of any mobile monetisation strategy in its IPO filing,” says Veremis. “Facebook must be careful as it rolls out mobile advertising that it makes full use of the technology available to deliver messages which are compelling and intuitive for the consumer to receive on the unique mobile phone format. By the very nature of mobile as consumers’ most personal and intimate device, it risks sparking a major backlash on privacy and user data grounds.”   

Aaron Sorkins The Social Network might have been based very loosely on fact, but its looking like the film might have got one thing exactly right. Pushed to put ads on the site, the fictional Mark Zuckerberg – played by Jesse Eisenberg – refuses. “We dont even know what it is yet,” he says. “We dont know what it is. We dont know what it can be. We dont what it will be. We know that it is cool. That is a priceless asset Im not giving up.” With the release of Premium, could Facebook be putting that asset at risk?