Facebook Will Automatically Play Commercials Before You Sign In Beginning Thursday

A day after adding a “donate now” button to it’s page, which helps non-profits raise money, Facebook will now be introducing automatically played video ads. These ads will play on users’ feeds beginning on Thursday according to the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook has argued in the past that they’re beginning to replace television as the place where people spend their time being entertained. In order to capitalize on that advantage, it makes sense for Facebook to sell video ads because they could have a bigger reach/audience than a normal night on television.

Facebook has about 1 billion+ users. If half of those users saw the same video advertisement before signing in to their page, (and according to statistics, at least 50% of all users log on to the site on any given day) then you have the potential to reach more people globally than the Super Bowl.

The only problem with this scenario is that Facebook is starting to become more and more unpopular here in the United States. Could this alienate fans even more and lead Facebook into facing a “MySpace problem”?

The only positive for Facebook with this new idea is that they might be able to develop their video product with it. A YouTube star might choose to move their videos to their Facebook page exclusively if Facebook was able to promise a percentage of money from the video ads sold on their Facebook page.

For example, if I’m trying to go on Phillip DeFranco’s Facebook page to see his videos, maybe a 30 second ad pops up before I have access to the page or access to each video. In a potential situation, the money made off of those ads could be split between the talent/star and Facebook evenly which would be a better deal than what YouTube offers it’s stars and it helps Facebook continue to grow it’s pageviews.

This could become the first legitimate rival to YouTube in a perfect world.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand…..ads are expected to be 15 seconds long and will play on both mobile and desktop devices. It is estimated that ads could cost $2.5 million each.