Facebook's Real Advertising Problem Isn't Too Many Ads

„Fellow Forbes contributor Paul Tassi made the case in a post on Monday that the social network’s ads are »starting to spiral out of control« and clogging up the majority of his Facebook pages. However, from the screenshots he shows, it appears that some of the front-and-center news feed items are not actually ads, but unpaid posts from brands he liked that Facebook’s algorithm not surprisingly surfaced. (And for my part, I’ve never seen an ad at the top of my feed, only several pages down.) Tassi also added the point that other sites like (cough, cough) Forbes’ home page also run a heck of a lot of very prominent ads, so Facebook is hardly out of control in comparison.

If I can be so bold, I’d suggest that what Paul and others are really reacting to when they see »too many« Facebook ads is that Facebook hasn’t policed the ads in the prime real estate of the news feed to make sure they are anywhere close to the company’s own ideal of socially relevant brand messages. So the real problem to my mind isn’t too many ads, but too many irrelevant ads and too few useful ads.

Whether or not he and others would agree on that, one thing I bet we do agree on is that Facebook ads have gotten worse in recent months. The right-hand-side Marketplace, which Facebook ad firms refer to as RHS, has always had some pedestrian ads, but they were restricted in size and easy to ignore. So easy, in fact, that Facebook early last year hit upon the capital idea of allowing ads right inside the main news feed. But even then, the ads were mostly rerun posts from the brand’s Facebook page, targeted at least in theory to your stated or inferred interests or the fact that you or your friends liked a page.

In recent months, though, I’ve seen more and more of these awful Web-style ads showing up in my news feed–again, not a lot of them at any one time, but one or two every day. In particular, I’ve been getting pestered by one particular set of ads–big »sponsored« updates in my news feed from the consumer finance lead-generation firm LowerMyBills.com.”